Hacker News Reader

Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

I can't argue about your preferences here, but these seem to be subjective preferences or complaints about warts.

In terms of feature and ecosystem surface, there is one area where I think Django is a clear winner: Django Admin. It is a very mature part of the framework and there is a large ecosystem around it. Compared to how useful that is for standing up an MVP SaaS (especially in anything remotely enterprisey), I would find it difficult to consider Rails if I ever envisioned needing admin.

For what it's worth though, I think that Django and Rails are both exceptional choices and in terms of ergonomics, best in class. I wouldn't have complaints about the framework to coming into a project using either one.

View on HN

I don't do webdev, but have primarily used Python for 10+ years. I've dabbled in both Rails and Django and agree with the parent's points. I would have stated them myself, but it was probably 5 years ago and it sounds like not much has changed. The arguments might be subjective, but they all ring true to me.

I thought Django Admin was cool when I first set it up, but as soon as I hit a few of the issues the parent mentioned, Admin broke or became irrelevant.

Django Admin is one of those things where it makes it easy to get 90% of the way there, which is sexy in a short demo, but the last 10% murders you.

I agree that having admin baked in is very convenient for simple CRUD, which saves the time to query the database. For every other criticism of Django compared to Rails I agree with whoever posted them. Still, to address another debated technology, Django is far better than any JavaScript backend I saw.

Having never used Django Admin, how would you compare to Rails Admin and Active Admin?

The only comparison I can do is that Django Admin is built-in out of the box, so I use it on every Django project. Rails/Active Admin is not built-in out of the box so I've never used it and always built my own admin page.

It's super weird because Rails is known for convention over configuration and includes default packages for basically everything you might need EXCEPT auth and admin. Meanwhile Django removes a lot of the magic of Rails and lets you do it yourself, except for bundling auth and admin into the core product.

I used ActiveAdmin a lot when I started and it always gave me a headache. From what I have seen of Django Admin (admittedly not a lot) it looks very similar?

I have found that at least for my users, admin type functionality and views generally require a lot of custom work that is not easily turned into convention. About 4 years ago I stopped using Active Admin completely and just started using Ransack + Kaminari gems on their own. I have been a much happier with the way that pattern has worked out.

It really depends on the specific use case. It's possible to arrive at a point where you'd get more mileage out of using something like react-admin and custom API views. But, until you arrive at that point, something like Django Admin or Active Admin can get you quite far.

I've used Active Admin in previous projects, but eventually got tired of it. As of late I've been using administrate with pretty good success: https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com