Rails really is fantastic at solving the sorts of problems most businesses have. It's highly dynamic, meaning you can scaffold and iterate quickly, and there's enough Rails coders out there that companies don't have to worry that they'll be left in a lurch if their one guy leaves.

I don't think Rails dev salary inflation will last more than a few years. Right now there's no such thing as an entry-level Rails gig, it's hard to break in and start getting critical professional experience that leads to being able to take advantage of those salaries. So there's a bit of a shortage at the moment. Eventually we'll build that ladder and the salaries will come back down some.

I wonder if there's some geography bias there? Rails seems a lot more popular in the Bay area than the rest of the country, which could be artificially inflating its value.

Then again, the armies of replaceable keyboard monkeys typing in Java might be artificially depressing Java wages, too.