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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#51

Post by aidos »

philipn wrote: post #28
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,…

In what ways is Django clumsy, inflexible or restrictive?

I'm not an expert on it but we used it for half a dozen projects and I have to say I found it to be all of those things.

It's a typical scenario really. On the surface it gives you a great framework for creating a website that works in a certain way but if you deviate from that you tend to find yourself in trouble.

In our case it was mostly the admin section that created the issues. I'm sure that if you know the framework well enough there are ways around the inflexibility but the fact of the matter is, the Django admin is heavily based on configuration. Where you have configuration you have limitations.

Things may have changed (it was about a year ago when I last worked with it) but at the time I struggled with simple things like; customising the auth system, easy debugging / error handling, clean outgoing email switching between dev / live, the templating system, etc. I seem to recall spending most of my time ripping code from the core framework into my views.py and tweaking it so I could get the behaviour the client was asking for.

As I say, it's been a while since I worked with it and I'm sure people have solutions to the issues I encountered but if you're planning on going off piste at all it's probably not for you.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#52

Post by asnyder »

andybak wrote: post #30
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,…

Wow. That's bit harsh. I'll try and stay civil. "The community is pretty much dead." - not from where I'm standing. I live in a tech-savvy town and there seems to be more Django devs here than Rails devs. Of course - it's not a popularity contest otherwise PHP would be the best web framework ;-) "All my Django projects ended up being a big mess" - that used to be the case with my own code but by reading other people'…

PHP would be the best web framework

PHP is not a web framework like Django, it's a language like Python.There are however, many good Django like PHP frameworks.

Just wanted to clarify.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#54

Post by andybak »

asnyder wrote: post #52
andybak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's bit harsh. I'll try and stay civil. "The community is pretty much dead." - not from where I'm standing. I live in a tech-savvy town and there seems to be more Django devs here than Rails devs. Of course - it's not a popularity contest otherwise PHP would be the best web framework ;-) "All my Django projects ended up being a big mess" - that used to be the case with my own code but by reading other people'…

PHP would be the best web framework PHP is not a web framework like Django, it's a language like Python.There are however, many good Django like PHP frameworks. Just wanted to clarify.

Partly a slip of the keyboard. But PHP is language + web-oriented 'libraries' (actually built-ins) so the it's a blurry distinction.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#55

Post by andybak »

aidos wrote: post #51
philipn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is Django clumsy, inflexible or restrictive?

I'm not an expert on it but we used it for half a dozen projects and I have to say I found it to be all of those things. It's a typical scenario really. On the surface it gives you a great framework for creating a website that works in a certain way but if you deviate from that you tend to find yourself in trouble. In our case it was mostly the admin section that created the issues. I'm sure that if you know the fram…

I'd loved to have exchanged emails with you a year ago.

The admin is amazingly malleable. Almost everything can be overridden and replaced. There's plenty of nice debugging/logging solutions (Werkzeug+Django Extensions being my favourite). Email switching between dev/producution is trivial (unless I'm misunderstanding you).

There ARE some clunky parts to customizing auth - mainly around extending the User model - but it's not that terrible.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

aidos wrote: post #51
philipn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is Django clumsy, inflexible or restrictive?

I'm not an expert on it but we used it for half a dozen projects and I have to say I found it to be all of those things. It's a typical scenario really. On the surface it gives you a great framework for creating a website that works in a certain way but if you deviate from that you tend to find yourself in trouble. In our case it was mostly the admin section that created the issues. I'm sure that if you know the fram…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#57

Post by sghill »

I have the same first two questions as you, so I'm glad you asked.

I can say a large part of me starting developing with Rails is the community. Many, many publishers have books. When I was in school our library had more material on Ruby/Rails than anything else in web dev. The online community is also fantastic as you've noted. Example: someone has taken the time to make ASCIIcasts out of Railscasts is incredible...and very helpful, as I'd often rather read than watch.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#58

Post by fragsworth »

tmhedberg wrote: post #27
halayli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Care to qualify this highly general and rather hyperbolic statement? Which specific aspects of "micro" frameworks do you find to be "evil"?

You tend to need to add features in unforeseen ways. Popular large frameworks can facilitate this more than micro-frameworks can, resulting in less work on the developer's part.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#59

Post by endlessvoid94 »

true_religion wrote: post #34
endlessvoid94 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is rediculous. Everyone's app is different, and so Django is rightly agnostic as to how your settings are stored, and which are loaded. As for the scope of the problem: dealing with multiple development settings is Section 1, Page 1 of professional programming. It's a solved and trivial problem. This isn't like coding your own ORM or templating language.

Okay, let me rephrase.

It's not trivial. In rails, it's trivial. The framework has knowledge of these separate states of applications. Deploying a serious, hardened service on top of Django is an order of magnitude more complicated than something like Rails.

Schema migrations are yes, a "solved" problem, if by "solved" you mean a third party application that isn't baked into the framework.

Having built a service that hosts Django apps, I can tell you that serious, hardened, services are not as trivial as you think to build with Django. There are countless headaches, and at this point it makes sense to use Rails over Django if you care about making your life easy.

I'm not saying Django isn't without its advantages, but those advantages tend to pale in comparison to some of the problems when you scale past 10 users of a trivial app like a blog.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#60

Post by dgallagher »

mtogo wrote: post #38
c4urself wrote: post #26

tl;dr; (Not meant as a smart-ass comment but...) they're busy building stuff. I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. I believe this has to do with Python itself and the great docs on Djangoproject.com Just start doing the tutorial and voila. This has introduced a large amount of new programmers to Django and Python, making it gain…

I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. Wait, you're kidding right? Django is positively horrible for beginning programmers because it's a gigantic framework with an insane learning curve, and if you haven't done much/any webdev before it's almost impossible to learn. Sure, you and i can pick it up in a weekend, but i don't think it…

I learned how to write my first web app using Django. It had a learning curve, but once I got over that I was (and still am) flying.

Tracy Osborn's story about how she learned Django and built her first web-app is great too:

http://www.women2.org/from-web-designer-to-django-webapp-dev...

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