Ruby on Rails the Next Cold Fusion?

There is much talk about Ruby on Rails (RoR) and how it will revolutionize the way programs are developed. The technology allows rapid deployment of web products and relies on standard technologies. RoRs has certainly made it's mark.

Some of you may have read the rant by Mongrel creator Zed Shaw. I won't go into summarizing the article or adding my opinion because it's been done. After reading I started thinking about RoR and how it has impacted the community.

There no argument RoR has given us all a better way to think about development. It relies heavily on MVC and the separation of your Development, Test and Production coding environments. However, I wonder if Rails is the next Cold Fusion?

Both were praised for supplying a platform to quickly develop web-based technologies. Both excel in web applications and fall short when it comes to static content. Both suffer from performance issues when the application is scaled to any magnitude.

Sure, one is completely reliant on proprietary, expensive technology and the other is completely open source. Apache is arguably the de facto standard when it comes to open source web servers. There are others, of course, but look at any hosting environment and Apache is there by default.

What does Ruby on Rails use? Apache? Kinda, it does work, but most developers will tell you there are performance issues. What then? Mongrel? Yet another web server to install often times beside Apache in non-Rails environment.

What do we have then? For all intensive purposes the environment must be customize with special software to even get Ruby on Rails to work properly. Everything may be open source, but it becomes expensive in time with installation, configuration and ongoing maintenance.

Does this all sound like Deja Vu? Or I am completely off-base?