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I chose RoR over Python/Django for one simple reason: RoR's tight integration with the Prototype AJAX javascript library. Personally, I like Python as a language much better than Ruby. But if I'm going to code up a Web app, I want easy AJAX integration - I don't want to hand craft a bunch of javascript. It's not that I've got anything against writing javascript, but I hate, hate, hate trying to debug it.

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I have to agree with the other commenter. I prefer to "roll my own" here. Not because I don't like it when frameworks take care of mess for me, but because I'm constantly frustrated by how frameworks handle JS. A quick and dirty RESTful JSON api is easy enough to build in either framework, and once you're there, Ajax becomes pretty trivial (especially with any of the nice JS Frameworks)

Tight integration with prototype is one of the things I don't like about Rails, mainly because I don't like Prototype (I'm a big fan of JQuery).

Then what you want is jRails, which subs jQ in for Prototype in all the Rails helpers and removes Prototype from your project. You "plugin install" it, forget about Prototype, and use nothing but jQuery from then on.

very cool, thanks. wish I knew about it a month ago.

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