So, I've been working on a few small web projects for an assortment of businesses, pretty standard fair stuff, so I've seized the opportunity to finally do something of a personal analysis of the enormous mass of web frameworks out there (Rails, TG, Django etc). Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is _NOT_ a comparison, its an opinion. I've just been working with Django for the past several days, and I feel like I owe it a little bit of word-of-mouth.
Let me first explain, Django is really a completely different beast than either Rails or TurboGears. In my experiance, it seems that the real goal of those systems is to make sure we have to code as little as often, so massive slews of differently formatted configuration files, naming conventions and templates are really to be expected. Here's the problem, I'm a developer. I _like_ coding. Now, sometimes it is nice to design a SQL schema, and find your objects already waiting for you. Its also nice to have an authentication framework, templates are fine too, as long as its not a whole new language. The problem I started to run into fairly early on was I didn't know the 'Ruby on Rails' way to do it, but knew perfectly well how I might have done it in a chitzy CGI.
Turbo Gears wasn't much better, again, the goals of the project seems to be as little code as possible, but code is a wonderful common denominator, chances are if I'm using a python web framework, I already know python, why do I need a slew of other random file formats and templating systems? While Turbo Gears did offer an interesting GUI API (all AJAX'ed up of course) its still fairly new, and as a result, wasn't really featureful enough for my needs, and I was stuck with it, so I ventured onward.
Now, I had passed over Django initially because some reading left me with the impression that it wasn't nearly as much of a 'Magical Framework' as the other 2. It turnes out, thats what makes it rock. While Django doesn't have a flashy "Build ____ in 10 min screencast', and doesn't try to make decisions for you, its basically a nice pythonic wrapper around all the nasty bits of working with the web. Django only has 1 real config file, and its just python declarations, to handle url mapping, you get regular expressions. I know it doesn't sound glamorus, but after only an hour or so with Django, its abundantly obvious it was designed by real web developers. Theres an incredibly powerful and sleek caching system, a down right dirt easy templating system (its basically python, 20 minutes and you have it down).
I think perhaps the single most defining design decision (and one that does a great job embedding the usefulness of Django) is the lack of 'toolkit' like elements in the API. Instead, JSON and XML serialization are made fast and easy to use. Django doesn't shove a website on you, its really just a set of libraries and tools but with a little more polish and glue. Not to short what Django offers, on the contrary, I think it brilliant. I know python, so why shouldn't I define my models in SQLObject?
<offtopic> I wanted to apologize for the blog bumps I've been having, I think a post or 2 got reposted to some Planets, I hope it wasn't too irritating! </offtopic>
