First impressions

The first impression of Ruby on Rails is that it is a great framework, but because it is just now starting to gain attention (yes, there are already 2 books at O’Reily’s, but those guys work fast) there are lots of bugs and annoyances, that are just not there when you use an established framework like LAMP:

• Not enough information. I remember how difficult it was to get any kind of understandable information on HTML when the only resource was W3C. The same happened with CSS. I became familiar with PHP at a later stage, when there were hundreds of dedicated resources already and was impressed how virtually any question or problem can easily be googled and answered in seconds. This is of course not the disadvantage of the framework, but a disadvantage of the first-mover.
• Hosting options are extremely limited. For PHP there are thousands reliable hosters. I am not sure how my hosting provider will react if I ask him to provide me with a Ruby on Rails virtual host. (Is it possible, has it been done?)
• Limited number of building blocks. There are thousands of GPL and free projects and code snippets that you can use with your PHP project. This means that most of the time you are not writing projects from scratch, but rather modify existing code – this often makes delivery extremely rapid. I am not sure if the same is available for Rails.