If you are indeed interested in taking a substantive look at Ruby frameworks may I suggest opening the aperture a bit. While Rails is indeed feature rich and "one of the big boys" you would be well served by looking at Sinatra as well. It's as minimalist as they come while still scaling very well. Beyond that there's also Padrino which builds upon the former very nicely and still maintains much of Sinatra's elegance. Food for thought.