Ruby on Rails vs. Django
by Pace on October 26th, 2007 @ 8:56 am in
Off-Topic
Tags: database, django, programming, python, RoR, ruby, Ruby on Rails, web development
I’m about to start writing a web front end to a PostgreSQL back end. After looking at oodles of choices (Nenest, OpenToro, Alpha Five, php, JSP, cocoon, Plone, etc.) I’ve narrowed it down to either Ruby on Rails or Django. Ruby on Rails has more hype, but Django also sounds really good, and I’ve heard good things about Python. I don’t know either Python or Ruby yet; I know Lisp, Java, and a smattering of Perl. I’ll post again with more details about my decision process and my perceived pros and cons of each, but first I want to get some input without biasing y’all. Does anyone have any experience with Ruby on Rails or Django? How about Ruby or Python? Any input would be much appreciated; I’m planning on making this decision by Tuesday.
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7 Comments!
#2 Posted by 
gampolt on October 28th, 2007 7:42 pm | link
I’m currently developing application using RoR. Apologize that i never user django yet.
The most part i like is ActiveRecord, it’s the most cool thing i’ve found from ORM. You can evaluate active record first when you want to compare with django
#3 Posted by 
Beetle B. on October 29th, 2007 9:42 am | link
Never used Ruby or RoR.
Have used Python quite a bit. Love it, love it, love it. Easy to learn and easy to read another’s code. Did I mention that I love Python?
Have just started using Django. I quite like it so far, but can’t compare with RoR. Must say that I love the automatic Admin. Since I’m just starting, I can’t comment on its scalability, etc.
At this point, the only two reasons I’d give for using Django over RoR is the Admin and the fact that it may be quite good to know Python for other (non-Web) uses. Ruby is used a lot outside of RoR, but has nowhere near the level of pervasiveness as does Python.
#4 Posted by 
nancy stern on November 1st, 2007 11:23 pm | link
i have been using alpha five v8 to build web apps against SQL databases.
It has turned out to be extremely productive!
here is an example from their web site http://www.alphasoftware.com of a secure ecommerce app with reporting built in less than 1 man month
http://dweb.alphasoftware.com/AlphaFive/video/aswv8/ (90 second video)
http://afas.alphasoftware.com/ecommerce/ (actual demo web site)
#5 Posted by 
Pace on November 2nd, 2007 9:13 am | link
Nancy,
Alpha Five did indeed look very good, but I didn’t want to tie myself to a Windows web server deployment.
#6 Posted by 
mdipierro on November 6th, 2007 8:23 pm | link
Take a look at Gluon (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu) which combines the best of both wolds plus web based development and maintenance, ticketing system, database admin interface, can byte-code compile apps, etc.
#7 Posted by 
rapind on May 25th, 2008 11:07 am | link
I’ve posted a poll at: http://www.railsordjango.com
#1 Posted by
james on October 26th, 2007 7:23 pm | link
I am now enjoying my web app development in django, and the language itself (python). I don’t have much experience with ruby but from my short learning while trying to learn rails both are pretty the same. Ruby I think is much more object oriented, python is object oriented too, but it depends on your style of coding or your software design, as python is much a flexible language.
On the framework, I really like the newforms of django, it makes development to much easier! (you got to believe me on this). The template of django is cool also :) much easier to code with.
Though I sounds in favor to django, rails is much easier to learn from the start, but when going deep django is much easier and flexible. Rails has much more activity going on, and Rails 2 is just around the corner, while django hasn’t reach version 1 yet.