<p>I'm wondering if there's such a thing as Django-like ease of web app development combined with good deployment, debugging and other tools? </p>

<p>Django is a very productive framework for building content-heavy sites; the best I've tried and a breath of fresh air compared to some of the Java monstrosities out there. However it's written in Python which means there's little real support in the way of deployment/packaging, debugging, profilers and other tools that make building and maintaining applications much easier. </p>

<p>Ruby has similar issues and although I do like Ruby <strong>much</strong> better than I like Python, I get the impression that Rails is roughly in the same boat at Django when it comes to managing/supporting the app. </p>

<p>Has anyone here tried both Django and Grails (or other web frameworks) for non-trivial projects? How did they compare?</p>

cakephp.org
Cakephp is really good, really close to ruby on rails (1.2).  It is in php, works very well on shared hosts and is easy to implement.
The only downside is that the documentation is somewhat lacking, but you quickly get it and quickly start doing cool stuff.
I totally recommend cakephp.