I've been obsessing lately over how quickly I can develop and improve web applications. Being on soft money for years will do that to you, I suppose. Anyway, being a devoted python fan, a shocking wave of new toolkits has arrived recently: django, turbogears, and subway (oh, and zope3 has been out for a while, which defintely deserves a look). I haven't used ruby on rails or catalyst but I'm told they all have a similar imprint: full and integrated support stack for webapps from OR-mapping to controllers to templating, resulting in much faster implementation cycles. There's something about turbogears that I'm finding particularly compelling, but any of these looks potentially better than what I've been doing, which includes quixote and PTL for webapp control and templating, respectively. I still love quixote+PTL, and it's likely my code-design skills are wanting anyway, but I'm finding now that my two main webapps are both more than 18 months old, that each comprises many creaky corners and repetitive tasks that I suspect might wash away in one of these newer toolkits ("megaframeworks"?). Maybe more importantly, it seems like these new tools are being optimized for web2.0-style data publishing concurrent with and sometimes seamlessly alongside for-human interfaces. Though that kind of thing is fairly easily backported to 2002-03-era web frameworks it seems radically simpler in the 2004-05 ones. Has anybody out there jumped on one of these new toolkits? If so, am I just being distracted by the shinyness of the new stuff? Or are you seeing the kind of development-time speedups these things (and the fawning hype surrounding them) promise? Also, as I don't pay much attention to the .NET stack and tools like coldfusion, is it possible that my Free Software blinders have me believing these "new developments" are just catching up to where proprietary toolkits have been for years? Seems possible. And, heck, what's coming in 2006? :) -Dan