[bryanh]

This is spot on.

To elaborate a bit, Rails tended to have a lot more generated code (the fabled "magic") that really sped up development of your standard CRUD apps. As far as I can tell, this was fairly novel in web development. Django didn't really have a focus on that, you spent a little (lot?) more time configuring. It's better now though.

Of course, at the complete opposite of the spectrum, you have very minimalist stuff like Flask (Python) or Sinatra (Ruby) which is doesn't include a lot of bells and whistles. You'll have to import your own ORM, templating, etc...