On their Medium.com site Algotech Solutions has a post that does a side-by-side comparison of two web applications frameworks from two different languages: Symfony in PHP and Django in Python.

Many times have I heard the following from a developer: “I am scared to change technologies”, “I am excited but I’m afraid it will be entirely different”, “I only know , I’ve never seen any code in my life!”. Sounds familiar? This article will show you that different web frameworks are not in fact that different.

With the advent of open source software, modern frameworks have inspired each other in adding and improving features for easier and more efficient usage. I will try to explain the abstract notions under MVC Web frameworks and how you can easily implement them through any framework and programming language needed.

The article then walks through the basic setup and creation of a web application in each, going through:

• Installation
• Generating the sample application (Jobeet)
• Configuring the controllers and views
• Creating the view output

All of the code and command line calls are included in the post too. If finishes out with an overview of the similarities between the two frameworks and briefly mentions some of the differences (like when it comes to model handling).

In response to some criticism about his previous post with some framework benchmarks, Wojciech Sznapka has posted updated results using the latest versions of each framework.

In my previous post Modern framework comparison I presented performance tests, which compared Ruby On Rails, Django and Symfony2. After recieving a feedback in comments I decided to run this benchmark one more time on my own laptop (instead of on my hosting). The reason was simple: enviroment was outdated.

There were some overall performance increases were seen, but some statistics were higher - the "time per request" for all of them grew, some by quite a bit. He presents these benchmarks with a caveat, though:

You should never choose framework based on benchmarks. Those shows them from one point of view, but there are plenty of other aspects, such as support, community, maturity, number of ready to use components.

In this new post to his blog Wojciech Sznapka compares three different frameworks - Symfony2 (PHP), Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails (Ruby) - in their request handling performance, lines of code and average community on Github.

If you ask me, which one is the best - I can't point one, all of them are very good. But let's try to measure frameworks. For purpose of this article, I created three applications in Symfony2, Django and Ruby On Rails. All those apps do the same - show two tables, one shows top USA cities (by population), second shows US states with highest number of big cities (above 100k citizens). I don't want to measure frameworks by echoing "Hello world", because it's pointless.

Each of his applications use the same data set and use a default ORM with optimized queries, HTML rendered by an internal template engine and rounded floats. His performance requests (using Apache's ab) for this sample application show Symfony2 being able to handle the most requests/second followed by Ruby then Django. Symfony2 comes in at a larger file size than both the others combined, though. As far as the community is concerned, Ruby on Rails outpaces the others with about three times as many "watchers" on Github.

Be sure to read the comments for some opinions, both for and against his results.

Juozas Kaziukenas has reposted a video created by the RailsEmnvy.com folks (one of several, check out YouTube for more) that does a "Mac vs PC" Apple parody commercial of Ruby and PHP.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

Other videos include Ruby on Rails vs .NET, Ruby on Rails vs Django and, of course, Ruby on Rails vs ColdFusion.

Taylor Luk submitted some info about a project he's been working on for a while and is ready to release into the wild and see how useful it can be for others - H2o Template, a Django-inspired templating system.

I have been developing this for quite a while, started as a fun project to do django like syntax and compiles down to php code. Unlike the last django-like template for Zend Framework, this one is more stand alone. After couple major rewrite, now i am releasing 0.3 beta.

The syntax of the templates is pretty similar to Django and it includes a built-in caching driver, an extension system that allows for external filters/tags/extensions to be added in easily and internationalization support. He's currently using it on a CakePHP website in a view class on a production system.

Get more details and access the source on the project's github page.

On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico points out a Django templating language clone for PHP - Calypso.

Calypso is a full clone of the Django Template Language that helps developers separates the presentational and logic concerns of the application. It offers template inheritance, pluggable tags and filters, and can be easily integrated into the Zend Framework

The most powerful part of the Calypso system is the template inheritance. It allows you to build up a skeleton of templates that can be used for the entire site with blocks and areas that any other part of the application can easily override.

On the Zenning! blog there's a recent post, the first part of a series, that looks at various web application frameworks both PHP and not (including Ruby on Rails, Prado and Django).

As of now, we are moving through the era of web application frameworks. That's the landscape we are surrounded with. Plenty of frameworks have been built during these years broadly categorized under software frameworks, web application frameworks and JavaScript frameworks (or libraries), and plenty more are being developed.

He starts with these frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony
• Prado
• Django
• Ruby on Rails

He looks at the non-PHP frameworks first to see how difficult they'd be to get into. Despite reservations about the different language structure, he shows favoritism towards Ruby on Rails. He has reviewed the PHP frameworks yet, so it's not a final decision.