Gary King asked why a person would choose Ruby on Rails over Lisp in web development. Well, I don't know about that, but now that I've used TurboGears, there are things that I've become to appreciate in frameworks.

So, from the top of my head, not a complete or decisive list, and in no particular order, some of the things that I've grown to like in a web development framework:

• A decent website. (Which is kept up-to-date. Might even get a facelift now and then. Gasp.)
• Continuous development (That is, new releases.)
• Project quickstart. (tg-admin quickstart myproject and you're ready to hack and view results at localhost:8080 or whatever.)
• Painless but powerful HTML-templating. (Kid in TurboGears.)
• HTML-templates are can be viewed as HTML. (Ie. no custom "HTML" tags.)
• Easy ajax integration. (Especially important: don't have to duplicate anything on the server because of AJAX. Meaning that controller methods return the exact same data whether it's rendered with a Kid template or with Mochikit.)
• Ajax library that fixes some of Javascript's flaws (Mochikit makes Javascript look more like Python, in a good way.)
• Works on windows, too. (I primarily work on Linux, but I do need Windows box also.)
• Development environment. (I don't have to manually restart the webserver whenever I make changes in the templates or the code.)
• Quickstart tutorial. (Get a good understanding of the framework in just few minutes.)
• Documentation. (Well, the documentation of TurboGears is pretty scattered, but there is documentation.)
• Plugged-in persistence. (If I just want to persist something, it should be easy. And it is, with SQLObject.)
• "Shell access" to persistent data. (tg-admin shell ..)
• Bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes.
• Features, features, features.
• Straight-forward server configuration. (No XML, please.)
• Clear development/production distinction.
• MVC. (No religion here, it's just nice to have.)
• Fast and easy install.
• Visibility and buzz.

So, there.

It's not to say that every framework should have just those and a bunch of other features, but they make TurboGears feel good for me.