Rails versus Django
superjared.com
superjared.com
Here's my problem with all of these articles with the rails versus django battle-to-find-the-one-right-answer approach rather than rails and django different-arrows-in-the-quiver: they always seem to focus way down at too small a level of detail in their comparisons. I understand that being a programmer means being down in the trenches with the framework every day, so the temptation is to assume the important differences are down at that altitude as well and that's where the focus of any comparison should be. But it's totally wrong - they're just different at that level (not necessarily better or worse) and the important difference is at the higher level of what these tools are good at. And for that, you can look to where they came from to see their overall focus:
Rails -> came from building a web app (Basecamp) -> great for building apps, has to be rejiggered a bit for web sites
Django -> came from building a web site (several newspaper sites in Lawrence, Kansas) -> great for building sites, has to be rejiggered a bit for web apps
The idea for this has been building in my head for a while now and was solidified when I saw the creators of each framework say basically the same thing in a video showdown a few years back:
Rails -> If you know Ruby
Django -> If you know Python
I've been using Django for a while now, but the more we evolve our site, the less of Django we are using. Luckily, the separation of concerns thing really does work and we are able to replace components as we need to.
That also partly explains why I started a Ruby tutorial ages ago and never got around to finishing the series, even though I still get pretty good googlejuice from it:
http://alabut.com/nonsense/2005/03/ruby-self-tutorial-day-1-...
Perhaps I can think wishfully of one of them chiming in... ;)
With Django, it's easier making web sites because of the built in automatic admin interface. It's production ready. With Rails, you have a lot of plugins/generators to choose from which does the same thing though (which again, isn't a bad thing at all).
Honestly though, Rails/Django users have created plugins/apps to extend their favorite framework, so it's really easy to make websites AND web apps with both now.
Stuff like this really does make me feel like Rails was (at least originally) meant for "web apps" more so than websites with a large amount of static content. Not to say the latter can't be done in Rails, though. But the original focus of the framework seems clear.
Rails is also by nature a one-app pony - many web pages have more than one app that could reasonably be called "discrete" except they share users. Setting up something like that in Rails is messy no matter how you go about it. Further evidence would include the "REST everywhere" approach, which is wonderful if you're focussed on a full blown machine-accessible web app but a waste of time for something simpler.
I'm not exactly a Django expert either but I've heard that ones runs into limitations there quickly too - as you'd expect, no free lunches!
To sum up, both frameworks are good for what they are: a starting point. Any large project is going to find itself doing a lot of custom work anyway. So pick the language you like best, basically. For me that's Ruby but I have nothing against Python that goes much beyond the level of "I don't like the way it looks".
I'm working on my first Rails project at the moment and, as an exercise more than anything else, have been trying to keep things RESTful as much as possible. I am finding it quite difficult in some more complex situations to keep so strictly to the RESTful ideal and find that I must sometimes stray in deference to the way I want the UI to behave. Do you find that you need to stray out of the strict 7 actions when things like complex model relationships, user access control and AJAX come into the equation?
But yeah, I've also made my choice, for the foreseeable future, Ruby is for me, so Rails it is.
Well, I've never been a huge fan of REST when it comes to user-facing web pages. The "big 7" verbs seem to me to be limited and arbitrary, and while very interesting as a kind of natural API I don't use it for browser pages.
I think Rails over-hypes "REST everywhere" and if you don't have a clear use case, I'd forget about it, at least on "normal" pages. Trying to unify API access and normal web pages seems pointless to me. I also have other concerns, which I funnily enough wrote about:
http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/04/01/restful-confusion/
Good to see you, look forward to seeing the fruits of your labour!
Rails is not geared towards web apps, and Django is not geared towards web sites. Both tools are what you make of them; just because Django includes a built-in admin interface doesn't mean it has to be "rejiggered" to build anything else. Both, as full-stack frameworks, provide nearly exactly the same set of tools to the developer: an ORM, a templating language, a routing framework, and the glue that ties everything together.
You are also patently wrong about the importance differences being at a higher level. If you are only using the shallow, superficial features available to you, you are missing out on the differences that do make each framework unique. Anyone who has spent any quality time with either framework can tell you that these "high level" features (e.g. Rails scaffolding or Django's Admin) are almost never used in a real project. Next time, I would highly recommend going beyond the 15-minute screencast and actually reading into the guts of your framework. Who knows, maybe you could become a professional one day ;).
I think the latter is exactly what the article is saying, the title is actually a little misleading.
While this is obviously not the entire case and Django is a fantastic general purpose web framework, lemme just say this:
When using much of the django middleware, django.db.models, generic views, django.contrib and quality third party "apps" ( http://djangoplugables.com/ ), it's pretty close to the perfect "CMS".
And that's not a bad thing at all, it's just not the direction Rails has ever, or probably will ever, go.
Also, let me reiterate what I said above: this is obviously not the entire case and Django is a fantastic general purpose web framework.
Rails is a domain-specific language based on Ruby for building web applications.
Django is a framework you can use to build web applications with Python.
Do I misundetstand what monkey-patching means? Because other than a few types such as int & str and cmodules(I believe) I can patch my monkey with python all I want.
When choosing a framework, I want it to be community supported. This means it's under active development and open to change.
When programming an app against a framework, I want it to simply not break when updating to a point release.
I'm not really interested in a comparison of app implementation details of Rails versus Django. What I'd like to know is the crap I'm going to have to deal with moving from x.2 to x.3. Or y2.3 to y3.0. And how does the plugin/addin/module structure enforce limits and consistency?
And while we're at it, someone come up with more interesting posts than Rails versus Django. Can we get some well written comparisons of, say, a Clojure-framework for apps versus a C# one or a server-side JavaScript one?
Perhaps one approach would be running a Ruby instance internally, dedicated to exposing ActiveMerchant functionality.
* Authorize.net
* Trustcommerce
* Google checkout
* Cybersource
* Paypal
* Protx
* Purchase ordersThe transition of Rails to Merb shows that things are still in play. The reason that even the short-sighted, flawed comparisons are worthwhile is because we have so far to go towards creating a web framework that really helps or, for that matter, a language that really helps.
However difficult the discussion here is, it is necessary.