I have been working with Ruby and RoR for a few years now after using C# and Java. I now can put together web apps or APIs in hours vs days and integrate it with about anything out there from other APIs, using gems wrapping them or other gems for integration like redis, rabbitmq etc you name it. I have never ran into issues of incompatible gems I could not fix myself in a short period of time. It's incredible productive and reasonable fast. I am dealing with data reads/writes in the ten thousands of records per second and when something smells like bottleneck you still can throw in a native extension or use jruby and call java libs. If you are building all you do with boilerplate activerecord or other ORMS you just don't use it right. Flexibly is key. I think every challenge has it's best tools. I tried grails, play, spring mvc and other frameworks but promise that I can beat every of these frameworks in terms of development speed. Ruby is far from being dead and has a huge community. Having that said its always good to also stay up to date with other tools. For many deploying rails apps is a pain so why not throwing in warbler and deploy a war file to an app server...seconds later, boom, online and scalable. I could go on for hours:) I am a fan and so are our shareholders.