Rails vs. Django

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642

by kyro • 19 years ago

18 34 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.

So, how about pros/cons of each.

hsiung• 19 years ago

jesusphreak has a pretty good writeup that's worth reading on the pros of using django: http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_django

Having come from a rails background and later switching to django I think it comes down to a matter of preference. Django's ORM gets the job done but leaves something to be desired (ugly syntax, no multiple database support, also watch out for implicit cascading deletes!). Conversion to using SQLAlchemy was supposed to address the gaps, but the branch for the upgrade seems pretty dead... But overall I'm pretty happy due to the transparency of django's framework code. I've implemented some customizations that would have been a lot harder to pull off in rails.

If you had to choose a python web framework, I'd suggest taking a look at pylons which is more flexible (also, by default it uses mako templating which > django's templating and supports SQLAlchemy).

JMiao2• 19 years ago

agreed.

kashif7• 19 years ago

Actually SQL sucks and hence all wrappers suck too. The over-engineered SQLAlchemy sucks most. If you are python user you should find SQLAlchemy ugly.

As far as frameworks goes, for most deployments(not for all) I would suggest pylons over django.

Mako is very useful.

dood5• 19 years ago

I'm curious what you dislike about SQLAlchemy, the ORM, the SQL toolkit, or both?

jey3• 19 years ago

"Actually SQL sucks and hence all wrappers suck too. "

Amen.

JMiao2• 19 years ago

What type of app are you looking to build? The scope of the project would carry weight here.

andyn• 19 years ago

That and whether you're more comfortable using Python or Ruby.

SwellJoe2• 19 years ago

Deployment of Rails sucks.

Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact, it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's just a new stack of problems.

Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is an example of this, but I'm no expert).

Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst. But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.

davidw• 19 years ago

I went for rails myself, and agree about Mongrel. It seems like the Rails guys are all anxious to throw the Apache baby out with the bathwater, and spend a lot of time fooling around with dodgy ways of doing things.

For now, I use the mod_fcgid Apache module, and it seems to work ok for what I need.

altay• 19 years ago

i heard through the grapevine that zed shaw, the dude who wrote mongrel, is down on it and isn't actively developing it anymore. hopefully someone else will pick up the slack, but i'm afraid that 95% of the folks using ruby+rails are know-nothing newbies (like me). =P

anyone have any experience with lighttpd + rails?

menloparkbum• 19 years ago

what is the preferred way to deploy django these days?

brett• 19 years ago

mod_python

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/modpython/

jey3• 19 years ago

I'm not sure why they think "assload of processes + proxy" is so good either, but deploying an assload of mongrels behind the "pound" load balancer is damn easy. Plus, pound is light-weight, fast, and designed to be small so that it can be easily security audited.

All you have to do is install pound, edit the pound config file to tell it how many mongrels you have and what port range they live at (easy), do a "gem install mongrel_cluster", then a "mongrel_rails cluster::configure" and a "mongrel_rails cluster::start".

I know this sounds like a lot of steps, but if you've ever built and configured apache from source you know this is cake in comparison.

SwellJoe2• 19 years ago

Ah, yes, I'll wait here while you go convince a few shared hosting providers to let you do that to their servers.

rms• 19 years ago

What about Pylons?

dood5• 19 years ago

Pylons is deserving of attention. There is a small comparison of Django and Pylons here [http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Concepts+of+...].

I'm playing around with Pylons and have been impressed so far. The whole approach strikes me as more of a hackers framework; less magic, more flexible, extensible. Though the docs need a little work, and the community isn't as big as Django yet, Pylons seems to be blossoming into quite an excellent framework.

kashif7• 19 years ago

You are on the money dude, I have been using pylons for a while and it is much more usable than Django.

yrashk• 19 years ago

Rails looks to be more DRY than Django. Though I'm on Rails and don't really use Django.

kashif7• 19 years ago

What are you designing? One might be better suited.

hello_moto2• 19 years ago

kyro, why don't you do this instead:

1) Pick a very easy tutorial for both of them 2) Do them 3) Choose

Framework will only get better each day so if today Rails deployment sucks, tomorrow it'll become better unless the growth is stagnant. Same case with Pylons or Django or the 100000000000000001 python frameworks out there.

Now if you're looking for a job, Rails would be a better choice because the hype marketing has converted a lot of people (they drink the kool-aid straight from the hose).

dood5• 19 years ago

I don't think this is a good way to evaluate a framework; tutorials don't necessarily bear much relation to the reality of using the tool.

cnu• 19 years ago

Agreed. Most of the frameworks have the 20 minute tutorial which (most of the time) is no way comparable to the type of work we will be doing with it.

nanijoe• 19 years ago

A search on amazon.com for 'ruby on rails' yielded 48 books, a search for Django comes up wuth 3 unpublished books.

The stats above, made the decision for me.

Rails vs. Django

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