Evan Rabble is the lead developer on the forthcoming podcasting portal Odeo. He’s being working with Rails for some time now and has just done a write-up on how the productivity of the environment scales on a larger (than a todo example) project. Great perspectives. I especially like the one on the learning curve:

Another thing which i think is important when looking at web app frameworks is learning curve. I’ve had 4 other people pick up and contribute to the code base. Three of those people working remotely. They’ve all picked up and be able to understand the system quickly. The learning curve was very short and the code was generally readable.

This contrasts to my experience with zope, perl frameworks, and java. All three of those technologies had steep learning curves which required lots of face to face collaboration to bring people up to speed. With the exception of Florian, nobody had previous experience with rails or ruby beyond building a weekend example app and reading the tutorials.

Best of luck with the launch of Odeo!