Before I heard about rails (pre 1.0) I had been doing some stuff in PHP that was quite similar to Rails simply as my preferred convention. So when I saw Rails

Before I heard about rails (pre 1.0) I had been doing some stuff in PHP that was quite similar to Rails simply as my preferred convention. So when I saw Rails the thing I was most impressed by was Ruby, a very nice (aesthetically) language. It took me longer to realize that I would prefer not to use ActiveSupport or to allow any of the monkey patching and metaprogramming-because-i-can that became en vogue in the Rails community for a while. I think that if DHH had known about REST sooner, Rails controller layer would have been identical to Sinatra. The convention for building controller classes in Rails involves several more layers of indirection than Sinatra... the routes.rb file becomes a lookup table for classes whose names all fit a pattern that the programmer should not have to be aware of. The flexibility of the router is still nothing beyond what Sinatra accomplishes with its matching DSL.