Web frameworks 2006
I am writing this now as the end of the year approaches as I am sure that by the end of 2007 the web framework landscape will have changed again. Only a few years ago a web developer had Perl\CGI then along came ColdFusion, ASP and PHP. Until recently that's the way it was for web developers and very often each company would cook their own bespoke web framework with varying power around these. Then some chaps looked at Ruby as much more powerful dynamic language and cooked up Rails, no need for bespoke when now have a very powerful one to hand that you can adapt.
Of course in between these was JVM\Structs and CLR\Webforms but the need for complete control over output (and in some cases control over every inch of the framework) ment that these did'nt factor in some cases. Rails is gaining new members of its audience every day, drawn by the fact that it lets you get your job done quickly (like common database tasks with a ORM, like common output rendering, like moving databases etc) with control and with adaption. For the power users the appeal of Ruby as the language of Rails is big, I've not seen such raw OO power since Lisp CLOS. As a framework Rails builds in good design, it follows MVC and when you use Rails to build your web application you in turn follow MVC. Lastly and most importantly Rails has testability baked right in.
Rails has started something, already other frameworks are coming into the public domain, Seaside, Django, Erlyweb and more recently Scala on Sails. The impact of Rails onto Java and .NET has already lead to developments such as JVM\Sails and CLR\Castle MonoRail.
So in 2007 I think many of the ideas from Rails such as ORM's, migration and true MVC will finally reach the main stream. I think that adoption rates for these frameworks will increase as well, performance issues are a big limiting adoption factor but 2007 should see the introduction of performance boosting VM's for Rails in YARV (already being readied to be merged into Ruby), for Django in PyPy, and for Sails in the JVM\Hotspot.