Is Ruby beyond Java?

I just bought the Ruby and Beyond Java book from Foyles in London. I have played with Ruby on Rails but after reading blogs I think a bit of reading is in order.
I cannot help but think scripting is not the answer here but I really miss what Notes/Domino provides in the web world. I like the idea of just creating a field once and getting Create, Read, Update, and Delete without too much work. Struts, Hibernate, JSP and Tomcat involve a lot of typing and it does take time. Maybe my issue is getting Notes like flexibility from a relational back end but I do want to think on this issue for a while and I suspect there is no easy answer here.