[Nottingham] Web application development frameworks; Rails vs. Django vs ???

[Joshua Lock]

Afternoon gang,

I'm looking to develop a web application. This application will be  
quite complex so I'm looking to use one of the trendy web application  
development frameworks to ease the pain (and add to my skill set).

I'm writing to the list to ask advice, and seek recommendations on  
which framework to use.
I've heard of Rails[1] and Django[2] which I am led to believe are  
quite similar. However I have no preference over these as I have not  
used Ruby or Python before.
Also I'm not sure what else is out there; there must be similar  
efforts for PHP, Perl, etc?

Flame away guys! :)

Best,

Josh

[1] http://rubyonrails.org/
[2] http://www.djangoproject.com/
--
Joshua Lock
incandescant at googlemail.com