What is Ruby on Rails and why should I care?

OK. At a high level why should you? For websites and web applications you just want it to work as you expect it to for a reasonable price, right? We use Ruby on Rails because it allows us to meet these expectations.

Put simply Ruby on Rails brings together an elegant programming language (Ruby) with a highly productive framework (Rails) to create database driven web solutions for today.

But don't just take our word for it.....

“Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I’ve ever used. And that’s in a decade of doing web applications for a living. I’ve built my own frameworks, helped develop the Servlet API, and have created more than a few web servers from scratch. Nobody has done it like this before.”
James Duncan Davidson, Creator of Tomcat and Ant

Can Rails Scale? Absolutely!
YellowPages.com rewritten in Ruby on Rails
Think of it as something like Lego blocks of code...
Economy Stalling Your Small Business? Shift Gears

...and the framework is going to be continually improved, not least by the beta release of Rails 3.0 in February 2010 http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/2/5/rails-3-0-beta-release