Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 167 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#11

Post by maxklein »

chrisgo wrote: post #10
maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

Any experience with web2py?

I never tried anything else, but my next project will be with Bottle.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#13

Post by halayli »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

web micro frameworks are evil although they don't look like that in the beginning, I advice to avoid them by all means.

IMO, even though pylons 1.0 is now frozen, it is still one of the most flexible frameworks out there.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#14

Post by icey »

maxklein wrote: post #11
chrisgo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any experience with web2py?

I never tried anything else, but my next project will be with Bottle.

Why Bottle instead of Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/)? Bottle looks fun for little experiments, Flask seems like it's a little better suited to web app development given that it has plugins for all kinds of useful libraries.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#15

Post by aspir »

I went through the very same experience you're going through now, and ended up with Rails. The largest deciding factor was the size of the community in my geographic area. Sure, there's always going to be a nontrivial online community for any activity, and the online presence of Django is enough to keep you going. But, you'll need to get some face-to-face interaction in there -- at least I needed that when learning. Waiting for a message board post is not the same as asking a few questions back and forth with a more experienced developer.

My impression that I got from both communities is that while both are good at fostering the growth of existing members (most programming communities do this well). Django is really bad at "evangelism," via teaching non developers to code via Python/Django or converting existing devs over to the framework. In contrast, the Rails community is better than most for profit groups at this (think about Microsoft's initiatives vs. something like Rails for Zombies).

For an example, compare the two homepages. The Rails page is much better at actually conveying the it's information effectively than Django.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#16

Post by hswolff »

chrisgo wrote: post #10
maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

Any experience with web2py?

Web2py is great for those brand-spankin-new to Python MVC web development. That said past that stage I found it to be constricting in the amount of hand-holding it required, seeing myself begin to pour into the source code when I realized I was fighting with the framework and not enjoying it.

But truly, for beginners, it's top notch. Great teaching tool.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#17

Post by th0ma5 »

icey wrote: post #14
maxklein wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never tried anything else, but my next project will be with Bottle.

Why Bottle instead of Flask ( http://flask.pocoo.org/ )? Bottle looks fun for little experiments, Flask seems like it's a little better suited to web app development given that it has plugins for all kinds of useful libraries.

flask is really great!

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#18

Post by endlessvoid94 »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

I couldn't agree more. Django's inability to deal elegantly with, for example, development vs. testing vs. production SETTINGS is an obvious drawback.

If I have to use third party middleware or apps to deal with inadequacies of a framework, that's a pretty big alarm that something bigger is wrong.

I saw bottle just this past week on HN and I'm itching to give it a shot.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#19

Post by voidfiles »

I think the biggest thing most people are missing is that django is an okay base, but you shouldn't look just to the django community, you should look to the python community. Django is only one aspect of a whole stack, and you should be more worried about your language choice then your framework choice.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#20

Post by peregrine »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

Agreed. I've been using Django for 3months now and while the documentation is top notch, the examples are piss poor for things that are pretty much required to make anything past a simple blog.

And I actively reached out too, went to the IRC room, went to the forums, read the mailing list. And it feels dead, most blog posts with tutorials are years old and obsolete, there most of the applications we've tried to incorporate use deprecated methods. Its a real pain in the ass.

Not to mention the applications are all over the place, just look at this list https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Djangoap... it has lots of components but most of the "suggested" are not on there? Even worse is that most of those links are to dead projects with no activity.

I would go with Flask, Bottle, or tornado and if you need an ORM go with sqlalchemy or Mongo.

/rant sorry its been a hard few months.

Post reply on HN