But honestly, the thing I like most about Rails is the amazing community. In particular, http://railscasts.com/, which is (in my opinion) the corner stone of the Rails community. I think if Django or CakePHP had something like Railscasts I’d be a lot happier to use them.

I think you hit on some of the big differences, but one of the things I think most Django folks don’t pick up on immediately is the “pluggable” nature of Rails.

There are a kazillion plugins and gems out there that can make Rails do what you want it to do.

* Don’t like erb? Use liquid, which is basically an exact rewrite of the Django template language — with all its fun and flaws.

* Don’t like AR? Use Datamapper. You can hack it in now, but as of Rails 3 (which, frankly, we should start calling Djrails) you’ll be able to swap in any ORM you want pretty much effortlessly.

And so on.

The one piece of this I have not seen is an admin like Django’s. There are some out there, but nothing with that Wilson Minor touch, if you know what I mean.

The one project I’ll steer you to is Formtastic, which is an absolutely brilliant DSL for making forms easier to do. It’s really clever. You’ll still end up building forms for your admin, but the productivity lost there is more than gained when you have to do the same for your public-facing pages — which Django does nothing to help you along as far as I know.

On migrations, I would suggest spending a little more time with them. They are insanely useful. This is the Django admin for Rails: There are Django workalikes (sorta), but Rails migrations are one of the killer features I miss the most in Django.

Lastly, I think you missed the biggest Django advantage over Rails: pluggable applications, which is awesome. Rails 3 is supposed to have something like it, but to my mind this is the biggest killer feature of Django.

Nice post, and keep it up.

Yep, ActiveRecord is something that, if you come from another ORM, will bother at first. Then it will grow on you pretty fast. The problem is always the previous baseline comparison. The Migration part is actually much clever that it seems. You decouple the database maintenance from the model, and it shows. Being closer to SQL is also a good thing. I prefer not having too much magic on the mapping side and AR is pretty straightforward in this regard. As many already pointed out, you can easily use DataMapper or Sequel if you want (though most of the time I think they are not necessary). Then you have NoSQL databases nowadays, and you will drop AR for MongoMapper or MongoID or CouchRest anyways

I don’t really feel the need for an Admin in Rails. And it seems like the community feels the same because there were many attempts to make an Admin and none became really famous. So the conclusion is that the majority of use cases for Rails just don’t need it.

I also don’t think having Ruby directly in the templates is a bad thing in itself. It wasn’t bad in PHP or JSP as well. The problem is always the bad developer that decides to put everything in it. When this happens I don’t think that the tool has to be locked down, but the bad developer is the one who should leave. But, if you really need 100% Ruby free templates, you have great options such as Haml and Sass. You really should check them out (they even follow Python’s indentation, so you should feel right at home

There really is a dependency annoyance in Ruby/Rails, which was greatly simplified with the use of Bundler. I strongly recommend you take a look at gembundler.com. Than the dependency problem will become virtually non-existant as well.

You also need to take a look at the rest of the Ecosystem. Rails, by itself, is just the foundation for the rest of the community. It grows exponentially in power when you start using what the community has provided. RSpec and Cucumber + Webrat or Capybara + Factory Girl or Machinist + Metric Fu are a very very strong testing foundation. Then you can hook it up to Hudson or Cruise very easily. To deploy to production I strongly recommend you try Heroku.com. But if you want to build your own machine from scratch, Phusion Passenger will make it trivial.

Then you several gems/plugins such as Inherited Resources, Devise, Will Paginate, CarrierWare, Acts as Solr Reloaded, Thinking Sphinx, Formtastic, Twitter Stream, exception notifier, pdf-kit, admin_data, Resque or Delayed Job, CanCan, Acts as Taggable on Steroids, Whenever, AASM, etc. Check out http://ruby-toolbox.com for more goodies.

I hope you want to keep on with your pet project. Please try to explore those other projects and you will find out why Rails is so powerful as the foundation for this vast ecosystem.