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Ajax On Rails
mu-sly writes "Ajax and Rails - probably two of the biggest buzzwords in web development at the moment. In this article over at ONLamp, Curt Hibbs introduces the incredibly powerful Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's a great read, and serves as a gentle introduction to the cool stuff you can accomplish with ease using the Ajax features of Rails."
Get the Beta book http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index. html
If you're interested in Rails at all, this book is all you need.
RoR has caching : here and supports transactions : here
Enterprise software is a different game. Rails is pretty all around terrible at integrating with non-rails-intended database schemas which are plentiful in any enterprise situation.
I'm going to overlook the fact that a flexible caching mechanism has been in place since pre-snowdevil (maybe february) and transaction support was added at some point before the last time I worked with rails (late april). Keep in mind that it's still pre-1.0 and beta and not yet feature-complete. Criticizing it for a lack of features it supports, though, is in poor taste.
Furthermore, almost all rails development at this point has been executed using very small (5 people) core teams. J2EE supports large scale development because it was designed for it. Rails was designed to let a relatively small number of people write an agile application using the set of paradigms which rails was built on. Coming at it from an "I use java in the enterprise and couldn't plug rails in its place tomorrow" is a little bit unfair, because in the same sense, I couldn't just drop J2EE onto my own desktop and start developing with it tomorrow. (Not to mention that my boss would not even begin to authorize such an expenditure for one developer on one product).
I see rails more as a contender to PHP than to J2EE. J2EE and rails are not really comparable in the same market. Sure, rails beats the crap out of J2EE when you've got 1-3 developers on the project, and inversely, when there's more than 10, J2EE has a clear advantage. Coming from java, you're likely to miss many of the benefits of metaprogramming in rails. Even coming from python (a somewhat similar language to ruby), I was a bit startled at some of the techniques being used.
Your project might have failed, but I'm not sure it was completely rails that caused it. AR is very easily extensible (in a matter of hours, usually) to do all sorts of more enterprise-java-like things. Ruby's dynamic messaging and open classes makes that a much simpler affair than it would be in java. Why didn't you extend it to meet your needs? Also, how did you miss the fact that caching and transactions have been there for a while? Were you trying to shoehorn rails onto an old schema? Did you have prior ruby programming experience or were you learning as you went? Did you have prior experience in a dynamically typed language writing an app of similar complexity? Nothing is going to make the solution of a hard problem easy. Some things can make it more pleasant, if used correctly.
Rails supports optimisting locking out of the box. Just add a lock_version column to your table and it will do the rest.