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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. Padrino [http://www.padrinorb.com/] builds a rails-style framework from components which are exchangeable. You get to pick your testing library, the templating engine and the orm of your choice. If you don't like the router you can swap it out. It offer more flexibility and freedom of choice in that respect, but on the flip side doesn't achieve the same level of deep integration. It's more "a la carte" in DHH words.

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Rails allows you to choose your own testing framework [1][2][3] and plugins[4][5][6], templating engine[7][8][9], and ORM[10]. It's my understanding that before Rails 3, swapping out many default Rails was a bit hacky, but it's pretty standard now.

I know that and it's been posted often enough. However, the rails approach is fundamentally different from the padrino approach: Rails is very opinionated about which component should be used - as DHH stresses in his blog post. Padrino asks you when you generate your project. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.

Changing the defaults takes 2 minutes in Rails. What's the problem? Besides, there are gems like Rails Composer [1], which allow you to create new projects based on a template.

[1] - https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-composer/#your-options

Nobody ever said it's a problem. It's a different view of the world, that's all.

And what is the fundamental difference?

You can tell Padrino what you want during the creation of a new project.

You can tell Rails what you want immediately after the creation of a new project. Rails simply saves you time by having sane defaults. Convention over configuration at its best.

Padrinos fundamental philosophy is to be a framework built up of independent components and with limited opinions. Rails is by default opinionated: You can swap out certain components but all in all you're expected to do stuff "The Rails Way". That's the difference. It may or may not matter to you and in many ways produce the same end results, but the approach still differs.

Padrino is excellent and does not get enough coverage.

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