Straw Dogs

Rails Alternatives

Posted by admin on January 10th, 2008 filed in php, python, rails, ruby, web technologies

After the recent turmoil I thought it may be worth pointing out a few alternatives to the Rails framework. So here's 4 Ruby-based web framework alternatives for starters:

Ramaze - Has no known bugs and claims excellent stability. Thems fighting words!
Camping - A 'micro-framework', this is incredibly lightweight offering limited features but great efficiency and speed.
Merb - One of the frameworks recommended by Zed this started as Mongrel + ERB, hence the name. Its grown to be a very clean and efficient Ruby framework.
Hobo - Not a framework in its own right as its built on top of Rails but it offers a raft of extra functionality to ease and speed up development of your projects.

You may also be interested in the following web frameworks in other languages:

Cake (PHP) - One of PHP's most popular Rails alternatives. More verbose than Rails but providing much of the same functionality.
Symfony (PHP) - This is becoming increasingly popular with employers looking for experienced PHP developers.
Django (Python) - Hugely popular Python framework and although not the first its overtaken veteran frameworks like Turbogears to be the most popular Python in the box.
Turbogears (Python) - An older Python solution which is actually a jumble of technologies stuck together.
Sails (Java) - One of the many Java frameworks with a lot of promise.
Seaside (Smalltalk) - The onlySmalltalk based framework I know of. I'd really like to have a gander at this at a later date as one of Ruby's inspirations was Smalltalk so it'd be interesting to see how the forefathers go about framework creation.

If you're a fan of statistics, reviews and comparisons then maybe you'd like some of these - about as many web framework reviews as you can possibly want!