Rails and Django

Informative comparison of Ruby on Rails and Django. I’ve been playing with both of them lately. I don’t think it’s a case of nominating one as better; they have different pedigrees and, unless you’re making a decision based purely on the underlying language, your choice should be dictated by the kind of web application you’re building and they way you want to drive your object relationship mapping.

For a project based around letting a group of administrative users publish and review various types of content, the auto-generated administrative interface that Django puts together is ideal and would save a big chunk of development time. Likewise, in that scenario, it makes sense to model the object types you’re going to publish in code first and let your system take care of creating the appropriate database schema. Django isn’t just a content managment and publishing framework, but that’s where it shines at the moment.

Rails is still all about short circuiting the tedious cruft between designing your data model and putting together your interface. I’m still in awe that it’s able to strip away all of the bits of development that I find boring.

It should be really interesting to see what kind of cross-pollination happens between these two frameworks. Language issues aside, they’re from different neighbourhoods, and they have things to teach each other.

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