Services Vs Applications: Does Rails Encourage SOA Better Than Django?

Building larger applications tends to mean splitting your codebase up some how into manageable chunks. I’m quite interested in what I see as different approaches in the Rails and Django communities:

Django tends to recommend building Reusable Apps and we have sites like Django Pluggables to catalog what’s available. You then grab a few of these applications from the web or write your own, add them run them all together as part of a single application. Pinax is probabaly the poster child for this approach. The 0.5.1 release for instance appears to have 41 individual reusable apps, many written by other people and projects.

The Rails community tends to talk more about RESTful service orientated architectures, with things like ActiveResource making this sort of thing easier. So rather than your manageable chunks being within your application they’re separate instances in their own right.

I’d be interested in hearing from more people about their experiences, in particular if you’ve gone against the grain so to speak.