One of the big Rails philosophies that could help any platform is DRY: don't repeat yourself! ActiveRecord et al attempt to give you the reusable building block

One of the big Rails philosophies that could help any platform is DRY: don't repeat yourself! ActiveRecord et al attempt to give you the reusable building blocks that will be required in most sites. And in that regard, I think it really does reduce developer time. There are also drop-in basics for user authentication, etc. A well-designed extension should be mostly portable to other apps. For example, while I don't know of a SAML plugin off the top of my head, building it once could get you to 90% for future cases. The sophistication seems less daunting when you work iteratively, tackling small chunks of functionality. Having worked on both the J2EE and Rails stacks, I find Rails to be way more productive. But that productivity can be costly: many things feel like magic if you don't understand what the framework is doing. Looking back, J2EE development seems to require too much ceremony for too little reward. The goal for web development should be to spend time on the application's unique properties, rather than on the generic ones that everyone must build. A framework like Rails attempts to get every project on the same page for component interaction, but allows you to step outside the mold if necessary.