[rit]

Admittedly, Django was what first got me really going with Python (we started using it for some small projects as a possible replacement for PHP a few jobs ago).

There are however also some great alternatives within the Python community, in addition to Django which I no longer tend to use.

Pylons, which is very Rails like including having similar WebHelpers functions, and a port of the Rails "routes" system.

TurboGears, which is currently re-tooling itself to be based on Pylons.

And a variety of others that I'm probably forgetting.

I'm admittedly ignorant on alternatives on the Ruby side, but would be interested to see what other web frameworks people have built and the pros cons vs. Rails.

[jon_dahl]

I'm admittedly ignorant on alternatives on the Ruby side, but would be interested to see what other web frameworks people have built and the pros cons vs. Rails.

Merb is the big one. Think Rails, but more lightweight, greater emphasis on scaling and performance, and open to several ORMs (not just ActiveRecord), templating languages (not just ERB), and Javascript libraries.

Camping is a Ruby micro-framework that's been around for a while. The framework itself is 4kb, and Camping apps are designed to sit in one file. Used a bit on the side, but not especially widely for production work.

Sinatra is a newer microframework that looks similar to web.py, but in Ruby. Looks useful, and I've been meaning to get around to it.

The nice thing about Rails, Merb, and Camping is that if you know one, the others will be familiar. They're all MVC frameworks that support ActiveRecord (and other ORMs, sometimes). They all favor convention over configuration.

[rit]

>> Merb is the big one. Think Rails, but more lightweight, greater emphasis on scaling and performance, and open to several ORMs (not just ActiveRecord), templating languages (not just ERB), and Javascript libraries.

Sounds exactly like the reasons why I went to Pylons. I found SQLAlchemy to be a lot more powerful than the Django ORM, and we needed more application components to be 'detached' from the web interface which got wonky in Django.

I'll have to check these out, thanks.

[kaens]

And a variety of others that I'm probably forgetting.

I personally find CherryPy to be great for writing small web-apps. I haven't used it for anything larger yet, but I suspect that I'll continue to prefer it over other python web frameworks.