I think a lot of people could benefit from Rails as, essentially, a presentation layer for a larger system. I sort of sleepwalked into it in my own project: my Rails site is just the presentation layer for long-running Prawn-based PDF export jobs.<p>That could just as easily be the sort of batch processing Big Freaking Java Enterprise stuff we do at the day job -- we'd spend 1/10th the time on writing screens and action classes and still be able to use that ridiculously overpriced report generation library we're married to.<p>Wait a second... that needs to get brought up on Monday at work.
Here is a previous discussion on FlightCaster's architecture in case anyone missed it: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772808" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772808</a>