I know what you mean; the sample code I've seen looks completely foreign and intimidating. I look forward to seeing what you dig up...

what?

I'm a new Rails and longtime PHP developer, though I'm being drawn closer and closer to the Rails event horizon.

Praises:

First, it's a full stack framework. It attempts to solve the whole web problem. This lets you focus on writing the application, not the support apparatus.

With respect to full-stackness, Zend/PHP is shooting back with the Zend Framework, which I'm looking forward to seeing.

ActiveRecord. Rails will automatically persist your objects to the database for you without requiring you to write SQL or repetitive XML mappings. You can opt to write SQL if you want/need to. Development becomes much more fun when you don't have to worry about object persistence. I want an object. Thanks. Change like so. Save.

Likewise, the Model View Controller concept is so pervasive that it fades into the background, but enforces clear divisions in your code.

There's a large intersection in the user bases of Rails and Macs, which is nice.

I was stranded on a French speaking tropical island writing an object oriented PHP5 application that needed some Ajax features, so I checked out Rails' Ajax support and ended up extracting prototype.js (the Rails javascript library) for use with PHP.

Prototype was like Ruby at first; confusing and strange-syntaxed, but willing to repay the attention it took to understand it.

I downloaded the beta book PDF of Agile Web Development with Rails, got started with a little toy application, and was hooked.

It's really true that you don't need to know a lot of Ruby to get started with Rails. You follow Rails tutorials, look things up in "Programming Ruby" as you go, and pretty soon you've picked up some conversational Ruby. Things that looked foreign at first (like blocks) start to not only make sense, but seem a very powerful feature.

You'll definitely run into roadblocks and know that you could bang out the solution in ten minutes in another language. You'll spend time installing ruby gems, google about incompatibilities, read about configuring lighttpd, etc. But you'll learn a lot.

If I write another PHP application from the ground up, it will be heavily influenced by my experience with Rails.

-j

I work at a shop that makes heavy use of Java, Coldfusion, and PHP. One of our developers is a strong Ruby guy and he has nothing but disdain for Ruby on Rails. He says that it doesn't leverage the power of Ruby and it depends too much on conventions that don't fall in line with traditional Ruby development practices.

I've done some C development to make PHP work in a java servlet environment.. I can say the underpinnings of PHP are frightening! PHP will definitely get the job done, but just don't look at the internals.