Heres my input on these sort of questions: To determine what language to use, ask yourself the following question: a) How many devs will or you want to suppor

Heres my input on these sort of questions: To determine what language to use, ask yourself the following question: a) How many devs will or you want to support your application. b) Approximately (ballpark) how many users will be sending simultaneous requests? If there are going to be 20 people logged in total, performance is not an issue. c) How much time you have. d) How much hardware will you be using? e) Do you realize that doing queries from a table of 10 or 1000000 records are equivalent to the application if you return 2 rows to it? The work is in the database and will remain unchanged. Now, many places chose RoR/PHP (and some good frameworks) as a front-end, while using a "fast" language like java or erlang for the back-end. Facebook is one such example. They use erlang to handle comet requests and php to render the front end, and I think java to do back-end messaging and so on. The front-end code just queries it. If its a simple data application (show page, get input, query/update db, show page) then RoR is easy to make/maintain. If there are 10,000 users logged in at once, I'd think about this further. If you are a sole maintainer, RoR is nice since it makes writing and maintaining simple granted you know what you are doing.