Yuk... PHP. Sounds icky. Hehe. I've also been thinking of going into Node.js, but the advantages of Node compared to RoR is just not that big. The only big difference is the real-time aspect, which is relatively easy to implement with Pusher in RoR.

What do you say?

Idk, I got a little taste of RoR last year in a seminar I went to, but the instructor had one version of RoR on his machine and the lab had a different version on the machines, but some of the differences were so big that the demo applications we were trying to create didn't work.

I ended up catching on fairly quickly and I was able to help out other students, but when I tried installing it on my laptop at home on a Windows computer, I had to eventually bite the bullet and reformat my hard drive to get it working.

Installing node.js was so easy, and since I do a lot of front-end work in javascript already, I already knew the syntax, I just had to learn how the node.js functions work.

I've never heard of pusher, but I tried out socket.io and it was really easy to implement.

I also saw that node.js is getting some huge support from big companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. To me, it seems like 10 years down the line there's still going to be support for it in some way, shape or form, so I also based my decision on that as well. I can't honestly say the same about RoR, but I also haven't researched it as much.

As far as I can tell, there's not much of an advantage to Node over Rails, but Node has realtime built-in so I'll use it instead of Rails&EventMachine.

That said, they're both really fun to work with.