Mmmmm... Catalyst is more flexible and adaptable than Rails. Perl also sports two first rate ORMs (DBIx::Class and Rose::DB) to go with it and since Cat is totally agnostic about its Ms and its Vs, you can use either or neither; rolling your own, using the file tree, plain DBI, an external data service, the list is endless. Cat also deploys in more ways out of the box (update: I'm not sure this is the really the case).

I hear great things about ruby but consider that anything on the CPAN can be plugged into a Cat app. From LDAP or OpenID auth to a Berkeley or Filesys::Virtual WebDAV model or a JSON or XML view. And in many cases it's about 10 lines of code to do just that.

I started to pick up Rails for a new project almost four years ago because of the hype. The tutorial and installation were broken for my platform though so out of frustration I took a look around and found the, then, brand new Catalyst. Since I had an app running in 30 seconds for real, and not just in the promo, I haven't looked back and I'm damn glad.