A while ago I’ve started playing with Ruby on Rails again. The last time I did that was pre-v1.0, so it really has been a while. Now days however, the MVC framework world is much different. The difference is that the first time I saw Rails, I (and most of the people back then) did not know very much of ORM, and there simply weren’t any such rapid framework around. So, with MVC.NET, django, pylons, and more around.. what has changed?

More importantly, now that we have the luxury of choosing, by what criteria can one examine alternatives.

I’m trying to compile a list, as I go over each of the frameworks, this is a work in progress so it is incomplete.

• Model: how coupled is the framework and the ORM? how easy is it? what databases does it play with? (see: ActiveRecord)
• View: which template engines are there? how coupled? whats the performance of rendering one? how clear is the syntax? (see: Haml, Breve for template beauty)
• Helpers: what kind of syntactic sugar is there?
• Forms: how easy is it to handle forms, read: are we able to load a model object from a POST directly, can we drop a model object to a form directly? can we generate an object from a request directly? can the framework generate the form in html for us?
• Validation: what kind of validation is there? how capable is it? can we bind it to the model? to the form? how easy is it to add validation rules?
• Authorization and Authentication: does the framework have a built-in module for that? how fast can we configure and run it? can we extend it?
• Javascript/ajax: what libraries are supported? if none, how well will it play with one?
• Scalability: apparently, no one knows about scalability, I will not pretend to know what its all about. But one can gather information about how scalable is a framework, for better or worse (worse, see: twitter )
• TBC…