I too, really love Ruby (what little I know of it) but im starting to warm up to python.

Deploying Django appears to be nuts easier than Rails. You just need mod_python, and a few mod_python directives to make sure it can add the right directory to sys.path, and you’re good to go. Admittedly, my experience with deploying Django is far, far more limited than it is with Rails, but knowing how easy it is to manage mod_anything in a production Apache environment I’m reasonably confident that Django is as easy as it looks in this regard.

Now if only I liked Python as much as I like Ruby… :-\

Yea, rails does have its complications in a hosting environment. I’m not sure if Django suffers the same issues, but I imagine its a bit easier givin the maturity of apache/python integration.

I like your idea of testing Django, Symfony, and CakePHP — I hadn’t even heard of the latter two — and I’ll do that when I have some time in the near future. Have you seen http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Framework+Performance yet? Someone’s run their own testing and it looks like Django is the fastest, and I’d wager that has a lot to do with Python being a great language for this sort of thing, combined with mod_python’s maturity and speed.

Deploying Rails apps to a normal web hosting environment — which is to say, one designed for the hosting of static content and PHP pages through mod_php, and not one designed from the ground up for Rails — is still a borderline nightmare. Having good mod_ruby support and performance would probably go a long way, but Rails has fallen into the “just proxy it over HTTP” line of reasoning that Zope and Tomcat got into long ago. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with it, but it does change the way one can optimize and where performance gains can be found.

Your old roomate and ex-RH coworker here…

I’d like to see comparisons vs some of the php rails-esque frameworks like symfony or cake, and see how the results vary

Also, throw some Django in the mix… I am leaning towards that now rather than Rails for some web projects I’m working on. Admittedly my understanding of both frameworks is very shallow, but I like the loosely coupled approach of Django, much better. Plugins in rails so far seem to me to look like a huge workaround to the tight coupling of components that Rails uses. Just seems to make it a lot of extra work for you to write reusable bits. The Rails love affair with Mysql is a big turn off as well:P I do miss migrations though.. Either way, my opinions may change as I learn more about both frameworks… why oh why did I start playing WoW?

Anyways.. I wouldnt count rails out, until you run benchmarks against some of the php frameworks.

-Will