Scott made sure we got in on the academia thread over at the Rails Weblog. I guess they started moderating their comments because mine hasn’t showed up yet. So, here is what I submitted in case it gets eaten by their system.
I’m at California State University, Chico (Chico State for short) and we’ve developed and deployed four rails apps (mostly internal to the IT department) and have a couple in development. We also run an instance of typo for one of our developer blogs. Our development used to center around PHP or perl for “small jobs” with most of the “big stuff” being done in J2EE.
The J2EE stuff isn’t going anyway (uPortal/CAS), but a lot of the new development, at least in our area, is going to rails. In the move to rails we also jumped from cvs to svn, BBEdit to TextMate and started using Capistrano to ease deployment. We develop on OS X and deploy on RHEL 4/Apache2/MySQL4/FastCGI.
We never want to go back and we’re slowly infecting other departments. Rails is a great tool to have in our box of developer goodies. We got started with the AWDwR book and went on to Rails Recipes and Enterprise Integration with Ruby and of course the Pick Axe 2nd Ed.