Seivan, thanks for your gist. I also tried to make controllers more protocol oriented, but it didn't help much with nice DSL for filters. Let's keep trying, maybe something beautiful will born soon. I would love to see you Swifton fork with your experiments.

I think Ruby is both strength and weakness of Rails. From my 10 years experience with large scale and large codebase Rails projects I can say that Ruby dynamism helps in web development. But for sure it comes with really high price tag.