Lets compare similar development frameworks.

[A table of checkpoints to compare would be nice right here. Anyone?]
[Order based on popularity?]

Catalyst

Perl-based MVC with a number of Rails-inspired features. Less opinionated and so arguably more flexible than Rails, but not as easy for building simple CRUD type projects. Larger and more complex projects may find Catalyst useful as it includes some capabilities not present in Rails. Some of these include support for multi-column and character-based primary keys in the default ORM as well as Unicode support in the language.

Catalyst vs. Rails comparison on their site:

http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/wiki/VersusRails

http://www.catalystframework.org

Eleven
Another programming language seemingly like Ruby On Rails: stateful, web-based, open-source and simple.

Could synergy be found with the extremely simple “Eleven”? Some of its developers might adopt a Ruby implementation: fun all around.

The documentation first seemed written in 2005.

The website runs a handful of live demos with source code:

http://eleven.sourceforge.net/

Do the following seem familiar?:

"Rapid development, high performance, and stability are critical – but total control over the look and feel is not (since Eleven generates most of the user interface automatically).

"Eleven automates the work of making web applications statesafe, substantially reducing development time and effort over trying to achieve similar goals with traditional web programming languages like PHP and JSP.

“Applications are expressed in a high-level language with a simple, C-like syntax, from which the Eleven compiler generates complete, ready-to-run implementions in PHP or mod_perl.”

Eleven’s developer is Joe Morrison, who lived several years in the far east (if meaningful to us Rubyists), “with a passion for creating simple, elegant solutions.” His father is Paul Morrison, author of the online-readable Flow-Based Programming:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0442017715/
http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/

CGIKit

CGIKit is a web application framework written in Ruby. This framework bases component for development, you will develop CGI application speedy and efficiency…CGIKit refered the WebObjects architecture. The architecture of component and element is similar to WebObjects for the most part.

http://www.spice-of-life.net/cgikit/index_en.html

Borges

Borges is a continuation-based web application framework originally ported from on Seaside 2 that allows a linear style of programming of web applications. Components of a Borges web page can call and return from each other in a natural way, allowing complex interaction between components from simple methods. Backtracking is supported seamlessly, allowing a simple approach to building web applications that does not get in the developer’s way.

http://borges.rubyforge.org/

Zope

Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language [and some c/c++]. It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database (RDBMS) connections and code. It features a strong through-the-web development model, allowing you to update your web site from anywhere in the world. To allow for this, Zope also features a tightly integrated security model. Built around the concept of “safe delegation of control”, Zope’s security architecture also allows you to turn control over parts of a web site to other organizations or individuals. The transactional model applies not only to Zope’s object database, but to many relational database connectors as well, allowing for strong data integrity. This transaction model happens automatically, ensuring that all data is successfully stored in connected data sources by the time a response is returned to a web browser or other client.

http://www.zope.org/

Jigsaw

Okay, I admit it. I started this page because I developed my own Web Application Framework a couple of years ago called Jigsaw —exceedingly similar to Rails, but never quite finished. So now I’m back and again needing a good framework. So should I finish Jigsaw? No Way! Rather then create YAWAF (Yet Another Web Application Framework), I decided it would be better to contribute its worthy code and concepts to Rails. Isn’t that the “Better Thing To Do?”

See the Jigsaw page for more info.

WebObjects

WebObjects is a web application server. While it was originally written in Objective-C, since version 5 it has been entirely in java. Originally horrifically expensive, as of the shipment of Tiger (MacOS 10.4), WebObjects deployment is free (as in beer) with Tiger Server and development is free (as in beer) with every copy of Tiger. However, as of Tiger, there is no official support for other platforms (e.g. Solaris, Windows).

While you can have model records for each database entity, in WebObjects, that’s not required. Thus, the model can be implicit (you look up fields as required by key/value) or explicit (you generate the java classes for some or all of your database entities).

Each web page has its own java class (which functions as the controller) as well as its html file (which functions as the view) and a .wod file that separates some of the code issues from the html proper. For example, when iterating through a group of objects, the group definition goes in the .wod file.