David Heinemeier Hansson, "Agile Web Development with Rails" (repost)

Rails swept to world-wide attention in the Spring of 2005. Since then, it has become a serious and popular alternative to traditional web development environments such as Java and .NET. Why? Because Rails has the best of both worlds.
You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.