Ruby on Rails: Fad or Framework?

Ruby, a programming language written in the early 1990s in Japan, has won the attention of a growing number of developers. This has been attributed to Ruby's "killer app", Rails. Ruby on Rails is a web framework built on the programming biases held by rubyists and an elite group of core developers. Convention over configuration is a mantra that continues to win developers away from their mile long XML configuration files. One evidence of which is that attendance between the first Rails Conference (2006) and the latest (2007) is almost an order of magnitude. I will examine the strengths and potential weaknesses of Ruby and the Rails framework, it's future development, and the developer experience.