I have only used Django, Rails, CakePHP and raw PHP. Django has a superb ORM layer (beats Rails 10-0), where relations are really well implemented, as members of the model. Selects are easy, and can be chained (as filters). In Rails (even 2.0) I had to use find(:all, condition => <SQL fragment>. That is so not hiding the db layer. Generally, there is much less to none auto-magic. This is a thing I quite disliked in Rails, both as a beginner and beyond. I like to keep most things explicit. I find it baffling that Rails is considered easy to understand. Due to the auro-magic, I found the learning curve pretty steep.