Ruby on Rails
I have just been exploring with the much raved about web application framework ruby on rails. I downloaded and installed it and built the sample web application that comes attached with it in little over two hours (they said 15 minutes 
) . It is, however, quite easy to work with and very intuitive in my opinion.
The applications are based on the model-view-controller architecture pattern. This is part of the reason that made it intuitive. All I had to do was run a command to create a standard application environment, and then do all the development work in one of its sub directories. I created a couple of controllers that determine what actions are to be done when a particular URL is entered, for example, http://domain/newspaper/view/12-11-2006. The controller would determine what action newspaper/view corresponds to. Meanwhile one also has to create a view page (HTML with server side tags) that determines how the display finally appears in the browser.
One of the more interesting things during the tests was the fact that the models created correspond to database tables. Say I wanted to create a database table for storing student information. I would also create a model class for students and this would map automatically to the database table. Better still this mapping by default is based on the names. So a students table in the database would be mapped to the Student model class.
For the time being I am still exploring it a little bit. Hopefully I can get in a real application running there. I was thinking of JoomlaOnRails! 