I am not at liberty to disclose the technology used unfortunately, otherwise I would have given more information in my previous post.
While rails may be quick to develop with and may be great for prototypes it is not something that is ready for the prime time. The cost to get up to speed in Java was negligible compared to the end result, in that we are now able to have less time spent trying to debug problems because of Ruby not functioning correctly or having to be restarted (we had several tasks that took some database crunching in which ruby would sometimes fall over, or just take up all of the available memory thereby starving other processes and eventually being killed by the oom killer leaving parts of our database in an inconsistent state).
"it is not something that is ready for the prime time."
Thats why millions of users are using hundreds of large scale web apps right now built on Rails and/or Ruby (ie: Github, Slideshare, Hulu, Justin.tv, Basecamp, Alice.com ...the list goes on and on http://rails100.pbworks.com/Alexa+Rankings).
Right...
Might want to do some homework before making such a statement. True Ruby has memory issues. Running Ruby enterprise edition by passenger helped us a ton. Typically memory issues have to do with poorly written ruby more than anything...which rails makes it easy to do....like Product.all.each type stuff ... stupid example
Which is of course, to use the technical term, "bullshit" :-)
There are a lot of statements that you could make that would be fair, like "Java is more mature", or "we have a lot of Java expertise, so it was much easier for us to debug it" or "for our particular needs, Rails simply wasn't suitable", but to say it's "not ready for prime time" is to deny the reality that it is used extensively in "prime time".
While rails may be quick to develop with and may be great for prototypes it is not something that is ready for the prime time. The cost to get up to speed in Java was negligible compared to the end result, in that we are now able to have less time spent trying to debug problems because of Ruby not functioning correctly or having to be restarted (we had several tasks that took some database crunching in which ruby would sometimes fall over, or just take up all of the available memory thereby starving other processes and eventually being killed by the oom killer leaving parts of our database in an inconsistent state).