1)
Django and Rails are both high level frameworks written in easy-to-learn scripting languages. We are comparing ‘brand a’ electric screwdriver to ‘brand b’ electric screwdriver.

2)
Stop comparing PHP/.NET to Rails/Djanog. Comparing a _language_ to a _framework-written-in-a-language_ does not compute. It’s like comparing a Twix-brand candy bar to a alternative confection process. One is genius and requires engineers – the other requires a hungry simpleton capable of removing a wrapper.

3)
Use whatever works for you. The time spent reading an arbitrary viewpoint(yes, like this one), could be spent learning a countless number of skill sets to accomplish the same task.

I am not sure how you can come to this conclusion.

The code I write in ruby since 6 years is very terse and very clear to me. Neatly arranged OOP too, with happy objects floating about.

I really fail to see how Ruby is not very clear. What is unclear about Ruby?

The whole Rails code is fairly trivial as well. I don’t get your complaint Dan Palmer.

- shev

Then one of my friends said “Why are you using Rails, Django is much nicer”. I had never heard of Django, but had a look and it clicked. The whole development workflow made perfect sense. I could visualise the whole project in its separate parts.

I had not done a huge amount of development before, only a few High School projects in .NET, and some attempted iPhone apps, but from a beginners perspective, knowing nothing about the languages or the frameworks, Django made so much more sense and felt like ‘the right way’ to do it.

I would highly recommend it for any web development. I now have a part time job as a Django developer!

First of all, I think both frameworks are good. However, what I discovered through my experience with both frameworks over two years, is that what Rails had in hype, Django had in substance.

I found that I could accomplish tasks faster, with more portability in Django than I could in Rails. Django’s admin gets me 99% of the way there with most projects, and that single app module alone has saved me months of development time and greatly streamlined the process of administrating data and permissions.

Django’s application structure and url patterns are highly modular to begin with. I can pull in apps as an svn:external, add the app to my installed applications, add the url patterns (2 lines of code total), sync my db or run the South migrations, and I’m up and running. Yes, you can write plugins in Rails, but it’s not the same.

I feel that Django’s ORM is just as or more powerful than ActiveRecord, with very clean syntax. Q objects make it very simple to create highly complex queries.

Django’s template system, while spartan in appearance, is much better in my opinion than allowing the embedding of pure Python or Ruby code in templates. You’re forced to encapsulate, and it makes for highly portable code. If you’re a Django developer and haven’t looked at writing template tags or inclusion tags, do so today.

Django’s popularity is reaching a tipping point, and I’m getting more and more calls from recruiters looking for Python/Django people.

In 13 years as a professional developer, it’s the most well-conceived framework I’ve used. It put the fun back in development for me, and saves me a lot of time. I’ll get on my soapbox for Django any day against Rails, .NET or PHP.

My $0.02.