Laura Thomson, a trued and true PHP and self-proclaimed as the "only person in the PHP blogosphere who hasn't said something about Ruby On Rails" has tried the language out and has posted about some of her thoughts today.

We've been working for a while on a RoR project. Originally it came in as a really high concept idea - the spec was more like a film treatment than a functional spec. [...] So we set out to build a prototype in six weeks. We are known as a PHP shop, although of our web dev, about half is in PHP and the other half in Perl. At the time we had working for us a very talented Rails guru, so we thought we'd give it a try.

Unfortunately, their "Rails Guru" moved on to more Ruby pastures so they've been left with maintaining the application. Laura, being one of the team, has learned a few things about the language that's caused an internet craze:

• It makes getting started easy. This is what it's famous for.
• As things get more complicated, the ideal of convention over configuration starts to get in your way.
• The documentation sucks. This is however, improving.
• The community support is really immature.
• Learning to debug apps is really really hard to begin with.

Of course, other things were learned and several books purchased - a learning experience to say the least (including working with a bit of UI design).