Magpie’s Django / Rails comparison
By Ryan Tomayko under Rails v. Django on 16. August 2005Sam Newman has a fairly thorough comparison of Django and Rails over at magpiebrain.com. He compares the following traits of the frameworks: language, requirements and installation, deployment options, caching, project setup, adding models, interaction with the database, projects and applications, controllers and URLs, templating options, and administration / user management.
It’s a nice comparison, although the concluding section on choosing a framework seems to be getting some flak:
If you are developing a simple (in a domain model sense) application where you want to use Ajax to deliver a great UI, Rails is probably for you. If however you want to develop an entire site with different types of applications within it - then Django’s plugable applications and general approach might be what you’re after. Equally, the better user and administration side of Django favours portal style applications – this is something you’ll have to do yourself if you want to use Rails.
Rails is, of course, not limited to AJAX-heavy apps with simple domain models. I’m assuming Sam didn’t mean to give that impression but was just trying to wrap up a long article quickly. Perhaps he’ll clarify a bit.
Django committer, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, followed up with some thoughts on the post.
As a side note, I had planned to do a series around this but I promised Adrian and Jacob I’d hold off until Django was launched-launched, which I assumed meant 1.0 at the time but that seems a ways off now… I’m not sure Django can get any more launched at this point so I might have to revisit that promise as I’m anxious to get moving on this.
Sam Newman:
Argh! You know me too well. Yes, what I really wanted to say is that both Django and Rails have their sweet spots, they overlap to an extent, and that if you’re not sold on either Ruby or Python yet you should pick the one closest to your sweetspot. Doing a Backpack-style web 2.0 application? Go Rails. Doing a more passive large-scale portal-type site? Go Django. What to make a web 2.0 app in Django? Go ahead - although Rails might give you more for it out of the box. Want to do a big portal-style site with Rails? I’m sure that’s possible too - Django just might like it a bit easier.
comment at 16. August 2005
Jeff Wood:
Uh? I still don’t get it… Everybody compares everything to Rails … Rails is great for a limited space … People need to look at Nitro ( http://nitrohq.com ) I didn’t see anything in Django that Nitro doesn’t have, and comes with Ruby syntax.
comment at 20. August 2005