Raellan

Yes! I'd argue that the same can be said for Django for those either currently using or exploring the use of the heavyweight Python web framework. Take a look at Flask and build your understanding from the ground up. Anyway, at the end of the day they all have their place and IRT the Op's question: It never hurts to gain an understanding of another language/framework. There's so many amazing projects across the entire landscape that it never hurts to have even a cursory familiarity (e.g. breadth and depth being complementary).

Another approach/method to dealing with identifiers, tokens, or system information (hostnames associated with your REST/DB/etc. calls) is to utilize serialized JSON/YAML. Also stored as KV pairs you can open/process/assign in your porject code. Thus keeping sensitive hard coded data elements out.

Really they are much of the same. Just a slightly different approach.

If you are indeed interested in taking a substantive look at Ruby frameworks may I suggest opening the aperture a bit. While Rails is indeed feature rich and "one of the big boys" you would be well served by looking at Sinatra as well. It's as minimalist as they come while still scaling very well. Beyond that there's also Padrino which builds upon the former very nicely and still maintains much of Sinatra's elegance. Food for thought.