Everyone knows I love Ruby on Rails, but for some time now I have been really curious about Django. Watching Snakes & Rubies only fueled the fire of my interest. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I am so busy writing Rails code that downloading and trying Django has not been able to float to the towards the top of my list. After last night’s Refresh Jacksonville meeting (hosted by nGen Works), I was talking to Sandro Turriate (my resident Python expert), about finding some time to get together and try a simple Django app. To my joy and surprise I received an email from Sandro at 3:15 this morning. Last night he put together a screencast showing how to do a simple todo list using Django. It’s sixteen minutes long & very, very cool. Thanks very much to Sandro for putting this together! Although there is no audio, it is really clear why people love Django. It’s clean, easy and does a lot of stuff for you. If I had tried Django first, I could easily have been using it today (and cursing every bit of press that Ruby on Rails has garnered over the past two years.) I was looking for the one thing that would make me say, “Wow, that’s better than Rails!” Instead I kept thinking, “Wow, that’s cool, but rails can do that, and that, and that.” I then realized why there seems to be so much animosity about Rails from the Python folks: Because Python & Django are really cool, and so why should Rails be getting all the attention? The answer, of course, is that Rails has a much better media kit than Django (thanks Jason Fried). It seems to me now that it doesn’t matter so much which you choose, as what you do with it. I won’t be switching away from Rails anytime soon, but I no longer expect Django folks to switch either. In the immortal words of Dr. Reverend Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”
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3 Comments
Adrian Holovaty has explicitly stated that he doesn’t intend to market Django until the 1.0 release.
http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/adrian_holovaty
Thanks for the link to the screencast!
Python is almost as dynamic a language as ruby. The big difference between Django and Rails is more in the philosophy of their design. Python people like libraries to be transparent and obvious how they work, while Ruby people tend to provide clean and pretty interfaces with “magic” behind the scenes. That said, both Rails and Django can be inflexible and problematic in different ways. I have yet to find a perfect way to make web apps
@Rooby,
I agree that neither are perfect. In fact we’re trying right now to come up with a better way to keep code manageable when the code base grows large.
As far as “magic” goes, here’s what I think: http://lesseverything.com/blog/archives/2012/01/20/there-is-no-magic-only-bad-magicians/