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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#72
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

0> Set up the DB 1> Describe a model 2> Write a view function 3> Write a template 4> Set up a URL conf How is this more difficult than or different to other web frameworks, and what do you consider 'insane' about it?

You forgot step -1> Write a test

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#73
post #55
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup, just as I say, I'm sure there are solutions to these things if you know the answers. I did look long and hard at the time though. We were using a version of Django where the auth/user stuff had just changed and there were no good examples of how to extend the user model (frustratingly there were good examples for the previous version).

Regarding the email stuff, my criteria for a framework is that I'd like it to send real emails on live and fake ones on dev. That is, email everything to me on dev along with a little header showing who the email was going to etc. Invaluable for testing.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#75
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"a third party application that isn't baked into the framework." In what way is this a bad thing? South has excellent support, code-quality and usage. The only thing that would change by building it into Django would be to tie it's release schedule to that of a much larger code-base.

Heh, I'm not bad mouthing south at all. If it didn't exist, I wouldn't use Django at all. Thank god for south.

But I'm using Django DESPITE the fact that I have to use south. Contrast this with Rails, which FORCES you to use migrations (last I checked).

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#76
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 think RoR and Django are both great frameworks. If you think that Django is too restrictive or inflexible, you are relying too much on the framework and not on your own abilities as a programmer. Django gets you up and running quickly, Python is where the real magic happens.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#77
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the best trolling I've seen yet in this thread.

Obviously you're going to disagree with me. You gave a talk about this at Djangocon, didn't you?

I'm not saying Django completely sucks -- I'm saying that in certain ways, it gets more and more complicated, rather than staying simple as you grow or build projects that need to scale.

Disqus is a clear outlier here, so I could be wrong. It just seems that every time I encounter a problem, someone says "It's easy to hack Django to fix this!" and that's the problem. I don't want to hack it -- I want it to work like that in the first place.

Pylons was AWESOME. I need to give Pyramid a try, I've heard great things.

I'm also certainly not badmouthing the contributors, I'm criticizing the framework's design. Which is something that's really hard to change after years of momentum.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#78
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,…

As someone who's been using Django since the magic removal branch, its documentation is top notch, not to mention the lack of magic makes it very usable, supportable, and build-able on. I can say definitely what's going on from the top layer to the bottom layer without any black box behaviour. Rails is full of sloppy coding, lots of magic, coders who think that return is an keyword, and bad practices. I have no probl…

> coders who think that return is an keyword

What makes you think it isn't?

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#79
post #52
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.

Why did this get downvoted? This guy is 100% correct and not being offensive. WTF, HN? See: post today about downvotes.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best trolling I've seen yet in this thread.

Obviously you're going to disagree with me. You gave a talk about this at Djangocon, didn't you? I'm not saying Django completely sucks -- I'm saying that in certain ways, it gets more and more complicated, rather than staying simple as you grow or build projects that need to scale. Disqus is a clear outlier here, so I could be wrong. It just seems that every time I encounter a problem, someone says "It's easy to hac…

The difference between my keynote and your comment is that I gave suggestions on how to fix the things I saw problems with, and I didn't belittle people by implicitly trivializing their apps in suggesting they only have "10 users".

Development and production settings is trivial with Django, so if you had problems with this, then I don't know what more I can say.

Lastly, there is a world of difference between developing a Django app and developing an company that deploys Django apps. There are some design decisions that were made in the beginning that makes the former easier and the latter more difficult. I think you're conflating the two.

In any case, I'm done with this thread.

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