What’s the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails?

The argument against wild productivity claims usually goes something like this: If I’ve got a decent hammer, I’d be hard-pressed to find another hammer to make me twice as productive, let alone 5 to 10 times more productive, because hammers have evolved over thousands of years. But people who compare Ruby on Rails with a mix of general-purpose Java frameworks are missing the point. You can be 10 times more productive for some problems by radically changing the nature of the tool. Professional framers now use nail guns that can drive in dozens of nails in the time it takes to hammer in one nail. Like nail guns, Rails is specialized. It’s a framework written with a laser focus on a single niche: new database-backed Web applications

The complete article is available on IBM Developer Works. The author tries to explore Rails as a tool for database-backed web application development than merely calling it a replacement for all the existing Java frameworks.