I noticed over at the Penny Arcade Forums that they've had a bit mySQL / phpBB bellyup and have decided to migrate to PostgreSQL, and build a custom forum using Ruby on Rails as their page scripting language of choice.

This is the first I've heard of this Ruby business, although working at a Microsoft-based development house I don't see a lot of stuff in the 'nix world, which RoR seems to be strongly biased towards. Obviously PHP is still the reigning champion

Anyone using it? Is it the s***? How does it compare to PHP and (if you have used it) ASP.Net2?

ruby's becoming pretty popular as a language (think of kind of like python, has its fingers in every hole). the beauty of ruby is it just makes sense, syntax is a bit wierd (coming from japan and all), but overall its quite nice.

ruby on rails is pretty amazing, scaffolding rocks for doing quick stuff. worth a shot, a little hard to find good documentation (although this free ruby book is looking promising - http://poignantguide.net/ruby/). Only real problem I see with it is the fact that a lot of stuff is done through CLI, which is a bit dodgy for most hosting where there is no access. Ways around of course tho.

While I was having a look at ror I came across a nice looking ticketing system ... http://www.simpleticket.net and a simple if not tacky feeling package for windows that gives you a taste of ror called Instant Rails.. http://rubyforge.org/projects/instantrails

ror is pretty nice, it can be very fast to learn how to use. I don't quite like it as much as python, c or java.

Check out some of the Ruby on Rails videos - http://www.rubyonrails.com/screencasts (1, 2 and 3 for BP users). I only heard about it when I got some file requests for those movies and I watched the 2nd one I think it was (Creating a weblog in 15 minutes) - pretty impressive.

Before you start panicking and migrating to ruby, there are a heap of PHP frameworks getting developed that are trying to similar things to ruby. The following might be of interest:

http://www.xisc.com
http://wasp.sourceforge.net/content/
http://www.symfony-project.com

How much previous programmings skills would be needed (if any) to be able to use RoR?

that's pretty funny. changing to ruby to increase scalability. does ruby even in support native threading yet?

How much previous programmings skills would be needed (if any) to be able to use RoR?

It depends on what you want to do in it. Chances are if you just want to do basic s*** then not much.

Rails rocks.

Learning it really isn't that hard but it really suits people with a good understanding of oop and rdbms. I had to learn a lot more about those things before I really understood how to use rails effectively, but then agian - those are pretty good things to have to learn rather than just humming along as another php scripter with no clue :)

Why would you bother when PHP is so easy to use!

thing I love about RoR is the fact that it gets rid of a lot of the mundane crap. IE: if you add a new field to a table in your DB, RoR will automatically add the field to the new/edit/list pages in scaffolding.

the thing I don't like about it is there doesn't to seem to be much control with where stuff sits. Im only doing my first serious site with it, but it's annoying having to think "okay so how do i do sessions/login security/other easy php stuff in ruby*.

Sounds like some gay fox8 sitcom involving a southern single mother with 8 ADD suffering kids.