Daniel: Thanks for sharing that. Interesting data point. You actually reminded me of another point I meant to make about Rails.

I'm a believer in the idea of the database being slave to the model, not the other way around. I think a dedicated model can be more expressive about the design than a SQL database schema.

Rob: Smarty is not your typical templating engine, which is why I was curious if Ruby/Rails had anything similar. It's an exceptionally useful too.