[kinofcain]

I'd add that Rails was also hugely influential in its focus on developer productivity. A lot of it was magic and incredibly difficult to debug or modify when it went wrong, but it raised the bar for how you market a framework to developers.

[brightball]

Yep. The Dev productivity area is where Rails really set the bar high. All the other "win the benchmark" stuff that everybody goes to to try to dethrone it is a fair example of people missing the point. :)