I have been meaning to look at Ruby on Rails for a while now - and I finally got around to playing with it. I understand the interest, and the hype. But my takeaway is that there is something deeper here - a trend towards Domain Specific Languages - Rails is a framework for a specific purpose, and it does that well.

In case you are not familiar with our work on Domain Specific Languages take a look at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/workshop/dsltools/