Great write-up of your experience! It's particularly interesting that you moved away from Java/GWT to RoR. Did you find handrolling your own javascript (+ frameworks) to be just as productive as the Java/GWT approach? (My RoR app has most of the funky javascript GUI after authorization, so it's not indexable anyway.)

Some other questions:

- When do you plan on releasing your git bundle for TextMate? :)

- Has there been any gotchas when using Joyent's Sun platform?

- Did you consider using extjs? (http://extjs.com/tutorial/using-ext-grid-ruby-rails)

Thanks again for posting.