Wow. Salesforce.com is now offering a connection adapter for Rails.
ActiveSalesforce (ASF) is a Ruby on Rails framework connection adapter that provides direct access to Salesforce.com managed data via AppExchange Web services API and Rail’s ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes, simplifying the creation of applications that use data from those entities. ASF also includes a Salesforce.com aware scaffold generator that leverages layout metadata to generate list, show, edit, and new views and a corresponding controller that closely match the look and feel of their native Salesforce.com counterparts.
Salesforce has nearly 400,000 paying customers, and apps developed with their suite of connection adapters (including PHP, Perl, etc as well as the new Rails kit) can be offered to the entire customer base. This is a big validation for Rails, and a huge market opportunity if you’re into the business collaboration/workflow space.