Ruby on Rails is an interesting rapid development web development platform that uses the Ruby language plus a bit of a web framework layer (favoring convention over configuration - meaning fewest steps to 'hello world' being sent worldwide). I've been working with it for about a year, but primarily using the latest version of the Mephisto blog platform. Stay tuned for some custom plugins I'm planning to release back to the community, once I get some time to comment them and get a public SVN running.

Unfortunately the wiki which held nearly all of the Mephisto blog documentation, both user and developer stuff, was running on a 'free web 2.0 hosting' service that went belly up after all effort was done, with no way to get the data out. I always remember this when people are talking about dumping all energy into some kind of cloud service.