OK, so usually I try to put together some cohesive ideas in my head before I start writing. I like to have a clear introduction, followed by a few well-thought out points, and a conclusion. But I’m just so psyched right now I can’t even do that.

Listen – Django is awesome.

I’ve been a Java developer for a while now. When Rails first came out, and it started getting its hype overload about two years ago, I downloaded it. I didn’t get it… I didn’t see what the fuss was about. It just seemed like a hodgepodge of 1.) scripts to automatically build stuff, 2.) a template engine, and 3.) a pretty nice ORM framework.

I’ve always been a fan of Python, and I heard that Django was kinda sorta Python’s analog to Ruby’s Rails. So I tried it, and wow. It’s so easy to get something working in short order! So far I’ve created a very small, bare-bones, reddit-esque submit-and-vote thing with Ajax vote buttons, user sign-ups, etc. The only thing it’s missing is comments. And styling – it really looks like crap right now, otherwise I might share it with you. But that will have to wait a bit longer.

I did all of this stuff in a matter of hours. By contrast, my simple little RSS aggregator with no database backend (devfunnel) took about a month of project time during the evenings, and I still wouldn’t really call that project “finished” yet. I did that project with Java and Apache Wicket.

But when it comes down to it, Django is really just 1.) scripts to automatically build stuff, 2.) a template engine, and 3.) a pretty nice ORM framework. With Rails, I think I couldn’t get past the fact that it was Ruby. Ruby has always seemed really foreign to me. I’m not sure why – people say “it’s just like Perl,” but it’s not. Not to me, anyway. I know Perl. I can read it. Ruby just seems inaccessible to me. I can’t be the only one who feels that way.

I’m not sure how well it would scale (from a code-maintenance perspective, not performance) to a large-scale project with scores of pages and hundreds of database tables, but I know that other people have figured that out, (e.g., I think The Washington Post’s site is Django-based) so it must be possible.

Anyway, I just needed to rave about Django. It’s awesome. It’s great that I’m having fun developing web apps!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under python django. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.