I definitely will. This past weekend I took some time to go through a few intro tutorials on nettuts. I'm blown away by the awesomeness of rails and how easy it makes TDD.
There's no rush or urgency to build the app I have in mind. It's going to be a learning experience. I'm just tired of using the same framework and php. I've been doing quite a bit of node.js at work and it's pretty sweet. I just want to branch out and try new languages / technologies. The app I have in mind will be using phantomjs, possibly backbone for the frontend, and it looks like I'll be learning RoR for the backend.
I definitely think I'm going to go for Rails. I've heard a lot of great things about Django as well. One of my coworkers swears by it. Thanks for the advice.
Codeigniter was the first php framework I learned. It was really easy to understand and extend. However it just doesn't feel right and I'm starting to think I'm just tired of php. I've seen bamboo invoice before. There are a few other robust projects I've seen but nothing that you could compare to 37signals apps or github.
Awesome. I've been looking for a reason to start learning rails. I took a look at devise when I was doing some research it looks awesome. Gems are so sweet. Codeigniter has a package management system (sparks) but the modules aren't that great or maintained. Thanks for your advice I'll definitely be looking into Rails and the gems you mentioned.
I've noticed over the past few weeks when I've been doing my research a lot of large scale applications use RoR. I haven't been able to find any applications that were built on Codeigniter that come close to the robustness of the apps using rails.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Right now the app is in it's early stages so the user base isn't anything to talk about. I just want to be prepared in case the app sees a spike in traffic and usage.