web2py was inspired by Ruby on Rails and, as Rails, it focuses on rapid development and follows a Model View Controller design. web2py differs from Rails because it is based on Python (thus it is faster and more scalable), because it provides a comprehensive web-based administrative interface (thus there is no need to ever type shell commands unless you wish), includes libraries to handle more protocols (for example XML-RPC and RSS feeds), and can run on the Google App Engine.