Personally I have worked with probably a dozen web frameworks thus far, on top of various languages, including Perl.
I'm not going to say that Ruby on Rails is the most productive, as python's Django (my bread and butter) is not too shabby either, and most popular platforms have some web framework that gets close or that are better at various tasks (e.g. I chose PlayFramework for some project I had because of its async support and couldn't be happier about it).
But IMHO, Rails 3 has the best design of the bunch - ActiveModel, ARel, Bundler, Passenger, database migrations that don't suck, less boilerplate than anything else of the same size/scope, the best plugins system I've seen (yes, I think it is better than Django's, no matter what Zed Shaw has to say about it) and also has the advantage of popularity.
This doesn't come without sacrifice. I hate that they've forcefully added SCSS/CoffeeScript as a default. But the great refactoring of Rails 3 had to be done, as frankly, the Rails 2 codebase was an incomprehensible mess. And you can't be on the leading edge of web frameworks without breaking stuff.
That said, Coffeescript as a default? Geez, I'd really like to know what they are smoking.
I'm not going to say that Ruby on Rails is the most productive, as python's Django (my bread and butter) is not too shabby either, and most popular platforms have some web framework that gets close or that are better at various tasks (e.g. I chose PlayFramework for some project I had because of its async support and couldn't be happier about it).
But IMHO, Rails 3 has the best design of the bunch - ActiveModel, ARel, Bundler, Passenger, database migrations that don't suck, less boilerplate than anything else of the same size/scope, the best plugins system I've seen (yes, I think it is better than Django's, no matter what Zed Shaw has to say about it) and also has the advantage of popularity.
This doesn't come without sacrifice. I hate that they've forcefully added SCSS/CoffeeScript as a default. But the great refactoring of Rails 3 had to be done, as frankly, the Rails 2 codebase was an incomprehensible mess. And you can't be on the leading edge of web frameworks without breaking stuff.
That said, Coffeescript as a default? Geez, I'd really like to know what they are smoking.