Padrino extends Sinatra with a wealth of extra features: namespaced route aliases, nested routes, controllers, i18n / internationalization, mailer system, django-esque admin interface and unified logging.
Most of these features can be added to Sinatra already, either manually or by selecting from a wide assortment of independent plugins. Padrino, on the other hand, provides a standard suite of functionality that, hopefully, will continue to be improved as a whole over time. It feels a lot like Ramaze (http://ramaze.net/) but with the similar functionality wrapped around Sinatra instead.
I am hard pressed to see the benefit of this unless you really need something like form helpers but don't want to use something like rails 3. There are a dozen and one templating systems out there already. The logging interface looks cool though. At least Padrino is modular so we can cherry pick what we need.
If you have ever used Sinatra, absolutely loved it and wanted an all-encompassing way to use it for a more complex problem seamlessly without having to move to Rails, then the need for Padrino becomes clear. Perhaps our post addressing some of these concerns will help explain our reasoning: http://www.padrinorb.com/blog/addressing-concerns-about-padr...
Padrino still doesn't support those out of the box. That is the intent of the padrino-cache gem which hasn't been fleshed out yet. It is the last major set of functionality that needs to be sorted out. In the meantime, the sinatra-cache from here:
seems to provide most of the needed functionality for now and since Padrino supports all rack / sinatra based extensions, it is a reasonable alternative until we finish integrated caching.
Fair enough. I can't blame you I want this functionality built into Padrino too and I am one of the core developers. I just haven't had the time to do it right yet and this is a piece that I want to be particularly easy to use and well-done.
Most of these features can be added to Sinatra already, either manually or by selecting from a wide assortment of independent plugins. Padrino, on the other hand, provides a standard suite of functionality that, hopefully, will continue to be improved as a whole over time. It feels a lot like Ramaze (http://ramaze.net/) but with the similar functionality wrapped around Sinatra instead.