Yehuda Katz Talks Rails 3.0
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A Q/A with Yehuda on the changes in Rails 3.0 and the changes in the Rails community.
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I actually have used both Django and Python, and I'm not alone in my criticism. Django avoids external dependencies, and has been criticized by others in the Python community for encouraging use of it's own custom middleware when standard WSGI middleware could be used instead.
In contrast, rails 3 embraces dependencies (we put a bunch of time into general-purpose Ruby dependency management to make this work). We also heavily leverage rack, making Rails 3 a first class Rack citizen.