<p>What is the equivalent to web controls in frameworks other than ASP.Net?</p>

<p>Specifically I'd like to know about Java, PHP and Ruby on Rails.</p>

<p>What are the relative merits/faults of each of these frameworks for web development?</p>

<p>I've had some exposure to ASP.Net and have been asked to look into developing an app that will have configurable controls on it. I know how I'd do this in ASP.Net, but it's to run on a linux box and in my experience Mono is not mature/stable when running ASP.Net.</p>

<p><strong>Clarification</strong></p>

<p>Basicly what I mean by webcontrols is a set of reusable componenet that I can initialize with various values.</p>

<p>So if for example I want to have a reusable component which draws a graph of some kind on the page. and i want to lay out several of these to graph different things.</p>

I believe there aren't.
ASP.NET Web controls are a hodgepodge of
```
<input>
```
and
```
<submit>
```
HTML elements put together to make use of the ASP.NET Web Forms Page Lifecycle. This in turn to facilitate windows-forms like behavior in a web application.
AFAIK in other frameworks they still make use of the plain HTML control elements coupled with Javascript to modify behavior.