[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.