recursion

Fluxiom has made made a very impressive digital asset management system based on Ruby on Rails. The demo is very cool (once you get Quicktime 7, that is). It has lots of AJAX effects that make the UI very slick (and that's not surprising because one of the developers is Thomas Fuchs who developed the script.aculo.us JavaScript effects library).

Thomas Fuchs has more about Fluxiom on his blog.

sigh I feel obsolete. I can't tell if Fluxiom does video analysis, though. I didn't notice any in the demo, so it doesn't look like they do video yet. Our saving grace!

If I were building a DAM application from scratch today, I'd do the web app portion using Rails and write web services for the integration with third-party systems like Flip Factory and Virage with whatever APIs those products support (Java or C++ or .Net, preferably Java).