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On 9/26/05, Daniel Chudnov <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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. Tangentially, ajaxian connection profiles mean a different kind of scalability is needed in web servers. This has a reasonable discussion: http://www.mortbay.com/MB/log/gregw/?permalink=Jetty6Continuations.html Put another way, rediculously small overheads per connection are needed, and heavy-weight web servers need attention in this area. > Has anybody out there jumped on one of these new toolkits? I've played with both Django and Rails, and am a .Net developer by day. >If so, am I > just being distracted by the shinyness of the new stuff? Yes and no. ASP.Net has a nice design/state management system, but does not include an ORM, unless you count viewstate + DataSet binding, which I definitely do not. ASP.Net has the honking framework class library. It has legions of developers, and Google has the answer to all your questions. It also largely has static typing, which I consider a large negative (discounting Iron Python, since basically none of the .Net legions use it). I think that Rails and Django are technically at least as good as ASP.Net, and outside of corp-IT world have the advantage of gratis as well as good community. Inside corp-IT, MS crushes these puny frameworks. ;-) Corps suffer from risk aversion, which means they miss the best of the good stuff. Ah, well, we have new startups coming. Of course, it's a venn diagram with some common core functionality, and each framework has distinct neat features. Which ones are most important? I think that depends what your app does. Greenspun's Panda Ch. 10 and 11 outline the distinctions well. Django is a CMS first. Rails is an app platform first. ASP.Net is a kitchen sink with squeaky knobs. ;-) >Or are you > seeing the kind of development-time speedups these things (and the fawning > hype surrounding them) promise? You mean like "10x more productive"? Well, just an ORM will go a long way to saving time, and model-from-DB or DB-from-model are both nice approaches. And the culture of unit testing is also a force multiplier. But see here for a strong rebuttal: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/03/11/catching_a_silver_bullet > 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? Living on soft money will do that to you. ;-) Actually, you can do ASP.Net for free (assuming you already have IIS); it's just that the IDE-with-codegen mindset is so strong in MS-land that no one bothers with the command-line compiler.