Topic awaiting preservation: Web Frameworks? (Page 1 of 1)

Anyone here use Django, Turbo Gears, or Ruby on Rails? Are they worthwhile technologies to learn? RoR seems to be getting the majority of the hype, but I love python and would prolly be more comfortable using it than learning ruby. Any experiences with these or links to valid comparisons?

I have a huge love for python. I still might consider it my favorite language.

However the Rails framework makes all of my love for python as a language near moot. Rails has so much power behind it, and so much good philosophy behind it that using anything else would be silly. When I sit down with Ruby on Rails all of the mistakes that other languages and frameworks have becomes very apparent. When I am learing a new concept or using the framework I often have the "Ahh" moments where doing something the Rails way just makes so much sense that I can't believe I did it any other way.

The reason that Rails is getting a lot of hype is because it is just such a good framework.

The number one draw that everyone seems to have towards rails is Curtis Hibbs Rolling with Rails tutorial where you see a web app go up in 20 minutes. But after you get past this tutorial you will see a reality that using this framework is not as easy as the turtorial would make it seem. After the basics there is a bit of a learning curve, and I think that might prevent some people from getting over the hump.

In my estimation the main feature of Rails is "Convention of Configuration." This way printed in Agile Development with Ruby on Rails, and it really makes sense. The point of the rails framework is to remove all of the trivial decisions that you had to make with other frameworks and allows you as the developer to concentrate on the important aspects.

The benifits of the rails frameworks are many.

* Great community
* Baked in testing, functional and unit
* Fixtures
* MVC Design
* ActiveRecord OR Mappings
* Excellent core language (Ruby is not all that different from python)
* Baked in database versioning support
* Can create your database using Ruby code (never write a create table statement again).
* Huge validation library
* Awesome support for third party libraries
* Tons and tons of convienince functions. (4.hours.ago is actually a correct function call)

I have not ever been this happy with an technology that I have used in the past, and if any of you remember I was very hyped when I first was getting into freebsd.

Dan @ Code Town

Comparison between PHP, Ruby, and Python frameworks: http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Framework+Performance
Perl equivalent: http://www.catalystframework.org/