[danso]

What is the perspective of longtime PHP/Wordpress/Drupal developers on this? I've done WP and Drupal briefly before doing Rails, basically all the time. But since then I've also built things in Sinatra and JS frameworks, too.

For awhile, I didn't touch Rails but went back to it and was pleasantly surprised that even though I enjoyed using Sinatra and Padrino, the weight that Rails's magic adds is counter-balanced by convenience that is most welcome to developers.

I contrast this with Drupal/Wordpress, in which the version upgrades make the platforms easier to build out for clients, but not much easier to develop for, in terms of either developing plugins or customizing the install (not sure with Drupal, I quit at around v5).

To me, it seems like Rails is adding some things I may never use, but those things seem to be optional...And from 3 to 4, they did cut back on some magic-hacks, such as the magic-finders that were too susceptible to security flaws.

I think a big part of why Rails may have better longevity than previous uber-platforms is because of its focus on testing. So it's quite feasible that Rails can always adapt (by being more modular) without causing unmitigated chaos in the developer ecosystem.

[gremlinsinc]

As someone who put all his cards in Rails for a few months to develop an app - to find out my company wanted it rewritten for lamp stack -- I am extremely LUCKY that I found Laravel-- it is Rails in all it's glory minus some popular gems, --but it's growing (500+ packages already) and Laravel 4 is just awesome to work w/ ... If it weren't for laravel, I'd drop php altogether..though for enterprise Symfony would be worth a look -but I currently don't need anything beyond Laravel.