Have you tried some of the other ruby frameworks, like merb? Merb is not that different from rails, but seems to perform better and can be used with other ORM's than ActiveRecord as well.
When we started nearly two years ago, we had to quickly drop Windows and simultaneously learn Linux/bash, vim, Ruby, Rails, Apache, SVN plus million other things in a hostile and unknown land of old :-))) No, I have not heard of Merb back then, we compared RoR against PHP and went with Rails and so far it wasn't a bad ride. The key to NOT be disappointed is to do everything "Rails-way", i.e. treat DB as a dumb swamp where you keep your models. So far so good.
Re:Rails is 100% magic with 0% design
by mechanical_fish on Monday January 21, 2008 @04:21PM
(#101828)
I'm pretty sure Merb didn't exist two years ago, so I wouldn't be too ashamed that you didn't hear of it back then. :)
The point I agree with him the most is that "different parts of Rails are accessible at different stages of processing the request". This one annoyed the hell out of me, it took me forever to solve the problem of adding your own custom configuration options and accessing them from anywhere in the app.