Rails was one of the hot topics @ OOP 2008 conference in Munich. It was amazing. .NET and Java guys alike were fascinated by different success stories about Rails and its "convention over configuration" paradigm.
Escpecially Dan North from Thoughtworks gave an impressing talk (without Powerpoint slides) about Rails being ready for the enterprise - or vice versa. He didn't forget to point out critical aspects of "hype technologies" like rails for long-term applications. What will happen in two years with this kind of framework, when famous front-runners like the pragmatic programmers Andy and Dave have detected more interesting technology?
This interesting aspect was further pushed in a follow-up discussion I had with one of our Ruby guys at Zühlke: Vassilis pointed out, that currently several new Ruby frameworks are created to cope with the faults built into Rails...
In the meantime convention over configuration has also reached the "big players". It will be very interesting to watch, how the success of Rails will affect future versions of .NET and JEE...
Microsofts DLR will be the first step into that direction.
