Django or Rails?

In the grand scheme of things, both Django and Rails are pretty equivalent—My suggestion is let the language you want to use determine things (and give Ruby a try if you haven’t played with it much but you have with Python).

Try some Ruby tutorials before you make a final decision about Python. Maybe you just aren’t familiar enough with Ruby yet. Also, don’t forget about Sinatra as another Ruby option. It’s easier to learn than Rails and more lightweight. Here’s “Hello World” in Sinatra:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘sinatra’
get ’/hi’ do
“Hello World!”
end

Doesn’t get much easier than that.

The Ruby community also tends to be more fun, in my opinion.

Interesting… I have used Python before but not in production, only for classes in school and messing around with Blender. Ruby looks interesting and I’ve heard about Sinatra and Merb… also about Merb becoming part of Rails 3? I walked through the tutorial at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ but it seemed very complicated (maybe because I don’t know much about Ruby). Do you know of any good sites to get going with Ruby? Everyone always says “Read the Pickaxe book” but I’m not ready to go buy that yet until I want a deeper treatment of the language.

@timtrueman—have you used Django? What do you like/dislike about it?

Thanks again for posting!
Steve

I work for Fluther and it’s built with Django. For my likes/dislikes check out my blog post from a few days ago: http://blog.fluther.com/going-for-a-trot-on-the-django-pony/.

Ahhh… Don’t I feel silly now! I didn’t know you worked for fluther… Anyway I’m done going back and forth with this because all the time spent wondering which framework to use could have been spent writing code. Python and Django it is! I already know Python and feel it’s a little less obtuse than Ruby. I’m sure Ruby is great but it seems like perl with a friendlier syntax. I like the way python is a little more terse. Thanks for your input!

Well after just a few days of development I was able to get a prett decent prototype together to show the suits. I think I made the right choice with django (though it’s still early) but it just feel more natural to me than pretty much any other framework I’ve used! Awesome!!

Django – Rails blows big time. I have never seem such unreadable crap in my life not to mention that DHH is about the biggest douche bag of all time.

Rails is about equivalent to Django if everybody on your team and whomever you are ever likely to work with has Macintoshes and no desire to ever work with anything else, you couldn’t care less about front end development best practices, the one pre-fab item you actually don’t have a use for is an elegant and flexible admin tool, you’re indifferent to a philosophy of framework way or highway that boils down to your directory structure as opposed to something that gets out of your way when you need it to and you’re not sure what possible use you could have for all that Python library stuff when you could just be grabbing plug-ins that do just enough with the framework’s core language to get to the majority-code part where they do something awful with JavaScript instead.

And by that I mean you could do a lot worse than Rails.