A Rails/Django Comparison

[Alan Green]

Greetings fellow Djangonauts,

Later this year, at the Open Source Developer's Conference in
Melbourne, Australia, Ben Askins and I will be presenting a paper
comparing Rails and Django.

The paper is currently available on Google docs:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcn8282p_1hg4sr9

Prior to the presentation, we're collecting feedback, so if you have
any, please email Ben or I at the address at the bottom of the paper.
Spoiler: the conclusion is that there's not much to choose between the
two frameworks.

More information on OSDC is available at: http://www.osdc.com.au/

Cheers,

Alan.
--
Alan Green
al...@bright-green.com - http://bright-green.com

[David Sissitka]

Good read, nice to see that there isn't a clear bias. A few thoughts:

1) First glimpse in to the Rails code and I've found a breakpoint (ReadersController.edit), that and the lack of image uploading functionality makes me question competence of the Rails developer.

The remaining are preference, a lot of people will probably disagree with me here.

2) It would have been nice had the playing field been more level, if both of them had spent the same amount of time with their repsective framework.
3) It doesn't mention anything about the Django programmer's prior Python experience or the Rails programmer's prior Ruby experience.

-David Sissitka

[Alan Green]

Hi David,

Thanks for the feedback.

On 11/14/06, David Sissitka <iai...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good read, nice to see that there isn't a clear bias. A few thoughts:
>
> 1) First glimpse in to the Rails code and I've found a breakpoint
> (ReadersController.edit), that and the lack of image uploading functionality
> makes me question competence of the Rails developer.

Ben has added image upload, so you no longer need to question his
competence :) Code should be up in the next 24 hours or so.

> The remaining are preference, a lot of people will probably disagree with me
> here.
>
> 2) It would have been nice had the playing field been more level, if both of
> them had spent the same amount of time with their repsective framework.
> 3) It doesn't mention anything about the Django programmer's prior Python
> experience or the Rails programmer's prior Ruby experience.

Excellent point. Will fix. Thankyou.

Cheers,

Alan.

>
> -David Sissitka

[Angel García Cuartero]

Hi there!

I found that most comparisons just don't talk about performance. It would be great to check how both frameworks deal with complex projects, not just Tada Lists... you know what I mean. :)

----- Mensaje original ----
De: Alan Green <alan....@gmail.com>
Para: django...@googlegroups.com
Enviado: martes, 14 de noviembre, 2006 1:54:33
Asunto: A Rails/Django Comparison

--
Alan Green
al...@bright-green.com - http://bright-green.com

---

LLama Gratis a cualquier PC del Mundo.
Llamadas a fijos y móviles desde 1 céntimo por minuto.
http://es.voice.yahoo.com

[Adrian Holovaty]

On 11/14/06, Angel García Cuartero <anhe...@yahoo.es> wrote:
> I found that most comparisons just don't talk about performance. It would be
> great to check how both frameworks deal with complex projects, not just Tada
> Lists... you know what I mean. :)

Yes. Performance. This article deliberately skims over performance,
but I'd suggest that's an important factor in people's decisions.

Another factor: the amount of good documentation. Rails has books that
cost money and skimpy free documentation, whereas Django has no
commercial books (yet) but fantastic free documentation, plus a free
book that's in the process of being finished (djangobook.com). Dozens
of people have told me this is a key Django advantage in their
experiences.

Adrian

--
Adrian Holovaty
holovaty.com | djangoproject.com

[David Sissitka]

Performance is definitely a factor, but do you think that it has a place in this article? There are so many ways to deploy a Rails application, which would you include? A book has been written on the subject, covering even half of them in little detail would easily double the article in size. :P If you're going to include works in progress then it's also worth mentioning that the Rails documentation drive has collected over $16,000 USD for professionally written documentation. Just trying to keep things even.

-David Sissitka

On 11/14/06, Adrian Holovaty <holo...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/14/06, Angel García Cuartero <anhe...@yahoo.es> wrote:
> I found that most comparisons just don't talk about performance. It would be
> great to check how both frameworks deal with complex projects, not just Tada
> Lists... you know what I mean. :)

Yes. Performance. This article deliberately skims over performance,
but I'd suggest that's an important factor in people's decisions.

Another factor: the amount of good documentation. Rails has books that
cost money and skimpy free documentation, whereas Django has no
commercial books (yet) but fantastic free documentation, plus a free

book that's in the process of being finished ( djangobook.com). Dozens

[Oliver Lavery]

FWIW, as someone who recently had to go through this evaluation process, yes perfromance does have a place. In fact addressing performance would make this article a lot more useful, I think.

Comparisons of lines of code or development time are interesting, but they're not that empirical. Lines of code is a notoriously dubious metric (especially when you compare code from different authors), and implementation time? Well you have two different developers working, and presumably they have different brains, so these numbers don't mean that much to me, either.

There are a bunch of ways to deploy django too. But if you picked a few sensible deployment options for both, and tested them, you'd get numbers that are at least as useful and as scientific as the rest of the article. It would be a very interesting data point as well, since the ultimate conclusion is that rails is more concise, it would be extremely interesting to know if that concission results in better performance, or whether it's just because Rails has more magic.

Cheers,
~ol

On 11/14/06, David Sissitka <iai...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Bill de hOra]

Alan Green wrote:
> Greetings fellow Djangonauts,
>
> Later this year, at the Open Source Developer's Conference in
> Melbourne, Australia, Ben Askins and I will be presenting a paper
> comparing Rails and Django.
>
> The paper is currently available on Google docs:
> http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcn8282p_1hg4sr9
>
> Prior to the presentation, we're collecting feedback, so if you have
> any, please email Ben or I at the address at the bottom of the paper.
> Spoiler: the conclusion is that there's not much to choose between the
> two frameworks.

I would have like to have seen some treatment of the following:

performance
i18n
deployment to production
session management
forms handling

This bit lost me:

"The difference would have been larger if the Django implementation did
not include YAML data loading, YAML data loading code accounts for 20%
of the lines of code in the Django application"

was that for tests?

cheers
Bill

[Alan Green]

Ben and I would like to send out a big thanks to everyone who provided
constructive feedback on our Rails/Django paper. It's all been
incorporated, either into the paper or as part of our OSDC
presentation.

Speaking of OSDC, will anyone else here be going?

Finally, we would have loved to have done some work on comparative
performance, but couldn't squeeze it into our schedule. If anyone out
there would like to do some performance research with the Habitual
Readers codebase, you're welcome to, and please drop us a line if we
can help in any way.