Back in August I wrote a piece enumerating our opinions about working with Ruby on Rails.  As promised therein, here's our 6 month followup.

A small bit of context first.  We currently serve a couple paying customers (monthly usage fees) and have another handful of live pilots and/or sites running our products.  We base our assessment on serving those customers.

In no particular order:

• Ruby on Rails applications can be fairly demanding on resources.  In addition, Ruby has weak garbage collection and memory management (Google for discussions of this) which compounds the problem.  Neither of these issues is insurmountable, however, as usage grows you'll need to allocate time/resources to deal with them.
• Incomplete support for out-of-band (aka background or "long-lived") processing.  There's some 3rd party tools to facilitate this, some of which are passionately supported, but I'd score them a "C+". 

Moreover, there is no discernible relationship between these tools and Rails itself, so there doesn't appear to be a near term future where they interact better (e.g. a lightweight Rails implementation that provides ActiveRecord support without the additional footprint).

• We are still very satisfied with the web development and speed of construction.
• In the past 6 months, there has been very little compelling added to the Rails Edge.  (Disclaimer:  we track the Edge and Core developments, but do not run on Edge).  In some respects this is good since it essentially means stability, but it also means the platform isn't innovating at the pace it had.

Furthermore, we don't find any significant benefit in the substantial focus on RESTful Rails.  There ultimately be a decline in the labor to create RESTful Rails apps, but there's no customer benefit, so little interest from us.

• Ruby ... DEFINITELY LOVE IT
• The community is a mixed bag when it comes to (a) available code / plugins / examples and (b) general assistance.  Lots available in both areas but of very sketchy quality and completeness.  The preponderance of dead-end open source projects and "unverified" coding examples or best practices makes seeking Rails answers problematic.
• Development tools are weak in every traditional facet, particularly for those developing on Microsoft Windows.
• We would like to see better support for Widgets/Gadgets/whatever-name-you-want to give embeddable Javascript components.  This isn't a hole, per se, but an area for more alternatives or support.

So that's pretty much it.  Thoughts?  Comments and disagreement welcome!