You can have your sexy app up in a couple of weeks. But maintaining it still takes time, no matter what language/framework you're using. Upgrading to a new version is in the end maintenance (security fixes, underlying framework improvements, and the refactorings that go hand in hand with upgrading).
If you go with rails you still can get to a point very quick, with the downside that you have to spend time for upgrading. But both the elegance and maturity of rails 3, in regard of it's age is quite unique. The older it gets the prettier.
[2]. Agreed. I've been working both on client projects and in startups. If you have 10 Rails projects from clients to support, this is a nightmare, (rails 1.2 - 3.0, from mongrels to passengers). It's hard to charge clients for a rails upgrade.
[3] I developed rails since 0.14 full-time. I think rails was/is very conservative regarding trendy things (except coffeescript).
>But maintaining it still takes time, no matter what language/framework you're using. Upgrading to a new version is in the end maintenance (security fixes, underlying framework improvements, and the refactorings that go hand in hand with upgrading).
Pointing out the obvious here but using matured languages/frameworks tends to have less of this problem.
It's like dating: stable -> boring and reliable while dynamically changing -> exciting but scary.
I'm not so sure about that, for me it was mostly just moving gems from environment.rb to a Gemfile and updating gems/plugins. After that, I fixed deprecation warnings and moved everything to AREL/scopes at a fairly leisurely pace.
Did you forget about the always-on XSS escaping? Fixing just that took me more than a week on a large project. (I still think there should have been an option to switch it off for old projects.)
If you go with rails you still can get to a point very quick, with the downside that you have to spend time for upgrading. But both the elegance and maturity of rails 3, in regard of it's age is quite unique. The older it gets the prettier.
[2]. Agreed. I've been working both on client projects and in startups. If you have 10 Rails projects from clients to support, this is a nightmare, (rails 1.2 - 3.0, from mongrels to passengers). It's hard to charge clients for a rails upgrade.
[3] I developed rails since 0.14 full-time. I think rails was/is very conservative regarding trendy things (except coffeescript).