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i take it i should stick to a very solid LAMP base then look into ruby on the rails once i have some real code under my belt?

Perhaps - it's not exactly the simplest of platforms to get. You'll definitely benefit from understanding the basics of web development.

make sure i don't learn some trendy language that dies in a couple years?

A valid concern, though I personally wouldn't be too worried. Even in case Rails might fail to gain momentum, at least Ruby language should be able to stick around - it's already getting established as the part of the landscape. Plus, Rails uses the hot paradigm of MVC web apps - there's competition on this area too, and people are using it a lot in other languages, so knowing the paradigm itself might help.

and i assume this isn't a good language for someone with very little (essentially no) experience to jump into and try to learn?

Ruby might, in itself, be a simple and easy-to-learn language, but you'll probably start to appreciate those things only after you know how to program somewhat, as in know how to do many tasks in other scripting languages or how to do complex things in OO languages.

As for Rails itself, knowing some Ruby and good idea of some things OO can do would be a good idea.

also, how is this implimented? does it preform operations serverside that output the html/xml/whatever code in a similar fashion as php?

Yep, that's the basic idea. Though the way you separate your code and HTML, and how you organize the code, is quite different from stock PHP.

does it include database software in the ruby framework or do you still need something that is/is like Mysql to handle databases?

Yes, if you are going to do a database-backed app (and most Rails folks usually are doing just that), you need an external database. It tries to make the thing abstract enough so you don't practically need to care much about what DB you use - MySQL and PostgreSQL are both supported, as is SQLite (so you don't need an actual database server running, though sqlite isn't exactly full of neat features) and many others.

Though there's other things that can be used as the data backends, like Madeleine, which is used by Instiki. But some serious wizardry is needed for that, I hear...

My personal choice is Instiki (http://www.instiki.org./

Also easily hackable, and absurdly easy to install on any machine with a ruby interpreter.

I recommend "Instiki".

It's a Ruby application that includes a webserver. It's fairly lightweight, SUPER-EASY to install, and runs on anything Ruby runs on.

http://instiki.org/

OTOH: My biggest problem with using a webapp for notetaking is a lack of control with the editor. You know, plain text can be viewed in a browser, so I suppose you could just use Emacs or vim or notepad. But then you don't get fancy formatting options...

1. Buy Mac
   
2. Plug In Network Cable
   
3. Chuckle... There is no step three! :)
   

http://instiki.org/

I use Instiki for my notes and can't live without it. Because it's a Wiki I can create WikiWords that force me to flesh out stuff that I might otherwise overlook. If you have a Mac or Linux the installation is super-simple, not sure how hard it is on Windows.

Instiki is by far the easiest wiki to setup and configure that I've tried. It would only take you a few minutes to try it out. It's especially easy to install on OSX and after doing so it will show up on your toolbar. And it has pdf and TeX output.

Instiki is the easiest wiki to setup and configure that I've tried. Especially if you're installing on OSX. And it has pdf and TeX output.

The availability of additional packages is currently rather limited.

The new second edition Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas & co. has an excellent section on built-in classes and modules that starts at page 427 and goes to page 777 - and even it is not exhaustive. I've done Ruby programming for pay and I've not found that Ruby was lacking any functionality that I've needed. Sure, Perl's CPAN is bigger than Ruby's RAA, but there's quite a bit of redundancy in the CPAN as well. I suspect that we're gaining rapidly on Python's repository as well.

I really liked the idea of everything being an object until I realised that beyond what Python already offered, I had no need for this level of object orientated-ness.

Different strokes for different folks... I very much appreciate Ruby's Smalltalk level of OOness.

What it really boiled down to was that I couldn't find a single good reason to make me adopt Ruby

How about Ruby's blocks? Or the fact that Ruby's lambdas (closures) allow you to do a lot more than Python's do.

...but I doubt it's evey [sic] going to arise.

Two links:
Rails and Instiki

Both are generating quite a bit of buzz even outside of the Ruby community.

Instiki is the easiest wiki to setup in my experience and it's got some cool features like export to pdf and the option to use RedCloth markup. They've even got an OSX all-in-one version - just download it and run and you'll see 'Wiki' on your toolbar.

Hey, web stuff is easy with Ruby as well. But I don't have such examples for you.

I have:

• Instiki, a Wiki completely written in Ruby. Has Revisioning Support, Internationalization, Feeds, Exporting to HTML and Latex, multiple Markup engines and more. I think the work on it started like three months ago.
• ActiveRecord: It is a object-relation mapping layer for Ruby. Just have a look at how natural it feels to use it and you will see what Ruby is able to do for you.

There's more like web engines that use Continuations to create a sequential application metapher, great templating engines and even multiple ways of making Ruby very performant in Web Applications.

Some would say that any use is inappropriate for PHP. Not me, but it's certainly one of the less interesting open source languages about.

For instance, Ruby's web application support has been rapidly gaining ground for quite a while now; fancy state-keeping systems last seen on LISP; a powerful server framework now integrated with the standard library; an innovative object-relational mapping library which makes interfacing with SQL databases childsplay; an interesting new web application framework which is causing quite a stir; an amazingly easy to set up Wiki server; a nifty template library gaining fancy bytecode based acceleration and native-C compilation. Every one of these projects alone is probably more interesting to the average developer than yet-another-OpenGL-module for an interpreted language... isn't it?

Maybe this is why this is News for Nerds, not News for Geeks ;)