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Comment by mattjaynes | Hacker News Reader

My first thought when reading this is "The Django guys even think about Rails?"

I don't know much about the Django community, but in the Rails community I seldom hear any discussion of Django. The few times I've heard talk of Django in the Rails community, it's along the lines of "Oh yeah, it's great for x/y/z use cases." It's hard for me to imagine DHH or other Rails notables writing anything remotely similar to this post.

Is this just me being sheltered? Or is there more of a pre-occupation with Rails in the Django community than vice-versa? If so, why? Just curious to hear what other's experiences have been.

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I think that some of the Python guys have a bit of Ruby envy: Python has steadily been gaining momentum over the years as the "scripting language", and along came Ruby and in the blink of an eye it had, at least in terms of publicity, surpassed Python, at least where web stuff was concerned, thanks to Rails.

Yup. Ian Bicking talked specifically about this at pycon last year.

I don't know much about the Rails community, but they should definitely look at Django.

Django currently is more modular. The ease with which you can integrate third-party components is unparalleled in my experience. I also like Django's ORM a whole lot more.

Rails is awesome, other frameworks are too ... but keeping blinders on is not good on the long term.

Rails 3 is taking a turn towards that direction. More modular, open to more ORM's (we have more than ActiveRecord these days, you know! :P), etc. And I'm happy for it. I really like that aspect of Django (and somewhat of Merb, though it was painful sometimes with all the deps), so I'm glad to see it coming to Rails.

Rails borrows plenty from django and python at large. Merb's slices and Rails' engines were directly inspired by Django's apps. Rails is getting automatic escaping of strings in templates after Django showed it was a better default. Rack was directly inspired by WSGI. Rip is based on pip. Rails developers aren't "keeping blinders on." Exactly the opposite.

I wonder if that is due, in part, to the fact that there are so many web frameworks for Python (Django, TurboGears, Pylons, etc) that maybe we tend to discuss web frameworks in general a little more then the Rails guys. I'm sure there are some out there but I've never heard of any other web frameworks for Ruby.

Ruby has a lot of web frameworks too. All your experience means is that you don't pay much attention to Ruby (which is fine, I'm only vaguely aware of the 3 you listed for Python)

How many of these are widely used in production? Merb was close. But now its part of Rails. Leaving these 2 there aren't any in the Ruby world. I see Sinatra blinking somewhere. But its far far away.

Sinatra is widely used and becoming pretty ubiquitous. It's supplanting camping, which was also relatively widely used, but not nearly as much as sinatra.

The Merb/Rails merge reveals some reasons why there aren't a lot of widely used Ruby frameworks, and I'd say it's mostly a large scale manifestation of DRY, combined with the maturity and wealth of features in the Rails codebase and the fact that most of the changes devs would like to see in Rails are already going into it.

Ramaze would come somewhere after Sinatra, most likely, though it has mostly been used for intranet apps.

How do you now this? How do you get the stats on what framework is in use?

See bottom of this page: http://wiki.ramaze.net/Home

"I'm sure there are some out there but I've never heard of any other web frameworks for Ruby."

Which is real shame, because there are many really good options for Ruby Web development.

What people are saying here abut Rails I felt about Nitro, whihc came out at the same time but had a more well-considered implementation. It was thread-safe from the start, much faster than Rails, did less mucking around (if any) with core Ruby classes, made it easy to swap in different ORMs, offered a trnsformation pipeline that was simialr to Rack middleware; in fact, it seemed much like what Rails3 is going to be, only five years ago.

But it got no traction in Rubyland. In fact, at one MountainWest RubyConf, Chad Fowler flat out told people to stop working on Nitro, because there was Rails.

There's a weird myopia among many Rubyists, a lack of curiosity about what else is happening.

There's generally an awareness and a decent discussion in the django community about other web frameworks in general. Even though I use Django full time, I usually keep an awareness of happenings in other Python frameworks like TurboGears, Pylons. And I usually tend to have an awareness of big events that are happening in Rails.

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