Xavier Defrang characterizes himself as a “…a frustrated Python-lover writing object-oriented PHP code”. He has contributed to the O’Reilly Python Cookbook and initiated the french translation of Dive Into Python. Despite his pythonic love, he has also managed to post the single most flattering article about Rails I’ve yet to stumble across in which he compares Ruby on Rails to Java, Python, and PHP.

The number of quotes and passages I want to pull out are so plentiful that I can hardly decide. Here goes a few:

• The recent Trails video walktrough just showed that J2EE zealots were definetly not getting it: the What is as important as the How

• I consider myself a real Pythonistas… and I’ve never thought of Ruby as attractive because of its syntax I (still) find a bit too sweet… But now that there is a killer app for Ruby which appears to square the circle of web development, can you think of a better time to look at it?

• I predict that a lot of high-profile PHP developers will soon or later switch to RoR. As a frustrated Python-lover writing object-oriented PHP code, Rails really fits as the best-of-both-world solution.

• The productivity boost offered by Rails is similar to what I experienced when switching from C++ to Python as my main development language. Everything is so simple and natural that it feels just like your own framework you would have grown yourself after years of trials and errors.

Anyway, go read the whole thing before I reveal all of it through quotes. It’s either a man who really gets it or a terrible suck up. Depending on your own personal enthusiasm about Rails :)