I love working in Ruby on Rails. Given migrations, routes, and its foundational classes, virtually every Web application decomposes to a set of small, finite, tractable problems: What am I storing (models)? What must be shown (views)? And how can the information be affected (controllers)?

Of course, Rails isn’t the only framework to provide model-view-controller features. (CakePHP is a Rails analog for PHP; Django is a parallel for Python; and Perl has Catalyst.) Moreover, MVC is just one technique. There are many approaches to constructing a Web application—simply because there’s no “right” way to define a data structure, render a page, and code logic...