Ruby on Rails Take 2

I spend a lot of my time these days writing back end services to process mountains of data across a large number of servers almost entirely written in Perl. I try to pride myself on using the right tool for the job and that means straying away from Perl from time to time. Over the past couple of years I've written (excluding Perl):
- Windows services in C#
- Front end touch screen apps in action script (never again, ever, never)
- C code for freeswitch
- A web front end in PHP that I later scrapped when I confirmed that I still dislike PHP
- A touch screen plc application in basic and ladder logic
- A decent bit of JavaScript for front end candy and ajaxy goodness

I've also toyed a bit with Objective-J (it just doesn't feel right to me [yet]) and node.js (see a couple of places where i might pull this out of the tool belt down the road).

All that to say, I am willing to give other things a shot and use what is available / appropriate. I usually fall back to Perl due to the enormous "home field advantage" that CPAN gives you as well as the ability to deliver solutions in a very short period of time.

I haven't revisited Ruby or Ruby on Rails since it was very new. At that time I disliked a large number of things about Rails and had no other use for Ruby so I moved on.

Rails has now hit 3.0 and I figure it's time to give it another shot, from what I hear a lot has changed.

My plan is to write a few articles as I go and document my findings so that they might be of use to others that go down this path.