Hmm, I'm pretty into CGI myself, but a good friend keeps preaching Ruby to me. I think I'll install it on my webserver this weekend, but what's the big deal? How is it better than PHP or CGI?

I'm a new yorker who wishes he could be using some RoR at work. Done a few little toy projects, but haven't been inspired or had any professional opportunity to do serious work.

InfoMoto, the main benefits are that Ruby's very powerful and object-oriented, and Rails provides a number of very cool things, including a near-zero-effort DB access API, an MVC web framework, a templating system for display (a la PHP, ASP, JSP), and very easy integration with a bunch of super-fancy front end stuff (lots of AJAX).

Hmm... I'll give it a shot then. I work with a mix of JSP and CGI, so if Ruby can give me the simplicity of CGI with the library support of JSP, I might be able to move to that. I've been using ajax mostly via ajaxtags on jsp, but the functionality is pretty light.

There's a New York Ruby group that meets every 2nd and last Tuesday of each month. We're in #nyc.rb on freenode. We also have a yahoo group, ruby-nyc. Hit us on irc or the yahoo group to get official details on meeting times and other stuff we're up to.