[Rails] Questions about rails and stores

[Eric Curtis]

Warning - Newbie Questions - I did not find answers to the following 
questions in the online FAQ and examples.

First off I would like to share my background - I am mainly a 
multimedia designer although I have a few years of experience with 
Lingo (from Director) but I mostly develop websites. In the past I have 
designed, cut the pages and created the html/css for many websites.

I like lean and  mean code that is not full of junk but I was recently 
hired to work on an online store project that had a packaged ASP 
back-end (Product Cart from Early Impact) which was not my choice and I 
am hating working in the code. Pages typically go for about 1500-2500 
lines of code with tons of if..then loops that try to account for every 
conceivable option in their store (most of which we do not use). Now I 
know I am stuck for this project but I have begun to poke around for an 
alternative in the future and was heading to PHP and maybe Zen Cart 
until I ran into RAILS.

So here are the questions:
1. Has it been done/is it possible to create complete online store with 
RAILS? Am I mistaking it's uses? An real world examples of stores?

2. How long would it take an average intelligence guy to get up to 
speed with all of the following: Ruby, Rails and SQL (I know a bit 
about that actually)? I would also be learning OO programming concepts 
as well I suppose...advice appreciated...

3. I worry that even if it is possible to get the store going that I 
will be too new or RAILS might not provide the amount of security 
required for such an endeavor. Is Security easy to figure out?

4. I can not devout full time hours to learning this stuff, so should I 
just look to hire someone instead and just go back to playing with my 
Photoshop and Cinema 4D?

Sincerely,

Eric Curtis