Ruby On Rails / Web Technologies

[Josh Charles]

I've finally got around to looking into "Ruby on Rails," and I'm
extremely impressed.  If you're not familiar with this framework, I
highly reccomend it.  After spending the last several months on a
large PHP project, during which I grew extremely sick of that
language, Rails is like a breath of fresh air.  It has:

Integrated AJAX / DHTML support
Automatic Object to Database Mapping
Model-View-Control structure
Code Generation for Models and Controls
Object / Table relationship mapping
Automatic generation for different testing / development / production
enviroments
Optional build in webserver
Templating
Integrated Unit Testing with customizable tests being generated as
Models are created
Integrated Load Testing
Integrated Code Statistic generator (i.e. discover total number of lines, etc.)

The greatest thing about it is you can start writing code right away
that just works.  It will automatically generate code for CRUD access
to the database that you can change and replace one at a time.

In other words, as soon as there is a database in place, the code
generators will handle the data manipulation code until you are ready
to customize it.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this framework is that it was
built by one guy while working on another project.

I know that it's been mentioned by some on this group that PHP5 is
faster than Ruby, but I've been unable to find any data to support
this.  The way I see it, PHP has alot of catching up to do before it
hits the functionality of even ASP.NET (version 2.0).

I've been looking rather strongly at ASP.NET, but it while it has some
extremely neat and interesting features, the code generation / testing
/ MVC / AJAX integration of the Rails framework is much, much better.

I should also say before I get flamed that I'm aware I'm sort of
comparing Apples to Oranges when comparing PHP5 to the Rails
Framework, but PHP's absences of a really good framework (I'm not
talking about PEAR or something like PHPNuke), is beginning to look
like a major problem.

Thoughts?