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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#91

Post by espeed »

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,…

It's not so much Django is dead as is using a relational database as the primary datastore is dying.

Django (and Rails) both came from a time when the RDBMS ruled so they were built around an ORM and are very ORM centric. People are moving away from using a relational database and onto using Mongo or a graph database as the primary datastore.

Graphs are a much more elegant way of storing relational data, and so I prefer a framework that isn't so tied to the RDBMS. Now I use Flask as my Web framework and Bulbflow (http://bulbflow.com) to connect to the Neo4j graph database.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#92

Post by jph »

Yes, pick up Ruby on Rails.

The RoR community is surely more vocal. Rails has been described as "an opinionated framework" and this ripples through many of the Ruby communities and projects.

Community thought leaders include people like Yehuda Katz, Jose Valim, Giles Bowkett, Ryan Bates, Ryan Davis, Loren Segal, and Charles Nutter, and companies like PeepCode, ThoughtBot, Intridea, EngineYard, and Pragmatic Programmer. There are many more of course.

In the Ruby ecosystem you'll often find these opinions lead to "more than one way to do it". Some examples that we're discussing at my company relate to comparisons of RubyGems/SlimGems, MRI/JRuby, Rails/Sinatra, RSpec/minitest, HTML/HAML, CSS/SASS, Capistrano/Chef, and many more choices.

I suggest you try RoR version 3.1 and you'll find many built-in pieces that can help you, including jQuery, HAML, SASS, the new asset pipeline, and more. You can use these or swap these out as you like. Heads up that some people think these provide too much "magic" and are hard to learn all at once, whereas other people think these are solid choices based on experience. Be sure whatever books you read are for Rails 3, not Rails 2.

Feel free to message me if you'd like more info.

And a plug: I'm hiring Rails developers.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#93

Post by TheSmoke »

there are totally unfair comments to django, django committers and the django users. having used many tools such as grails, rails, django, pylons, turbogears and pyramid for different size of projects and loving them all i have a good amount of experience with these tools. whenever i needed a hand, people in #django (in irc.freenode.net) or a djangonaut's blog post or answer on stackoverflow or the django mailing list helped me out. same applies to rails as well.

what you like with rails is its just being fancy and people acting like it's a miracle. it's not. it's a a tool which helps you prototype your application with scaffolding and some other nice things in a very small amount of time. so is django. complex application means complex code. this is not a django thing. it applies to every tool. do not let screencasts or posts hypnotize you as those guys are working with rails for many years. you will not develop rails apps like they do when you start over. your code will suck. you won't like your own code as you learn ruby and rails in depth and sharpen your skills. oh wait, that applies to python and django as well. :) it's not you though, we all have been there.

one final note. django community does not need a reference book. because django documentation is a reference manual that contains everything a django developer needs. however a cookbook or application-type teaching book would be nice.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#94

Post by mdda »

halayli wrote: post #13
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.

Has anyone else moved over to Pyramid (next iteration for Pylons - particularly with the Akhet suite : mako, beaker, SQLalchemy)? I'm surprised it isn't mentioned on HN more.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#95

Post by StavrosK »

espeed wrote: post #91
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,…

It's not so much Django is dead as is using a relational database as the primary datastore is dying. Django (and Rails) both came from a time when the RDBMS ruled so they were built around an ORM and are very ORM centric. People are moving away from using a relational database and onto using Mongo or a graph database as the primary datastore. Graphs are a much more elegant way of storing relational data, and so I pre…

I'm pretty sure that, once you populate a class instance with your data, the rest of Django is usable with very few changes. It's pretty loosely coupled, generally.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#96

Post by StavrosK »

zeeg wrote: post #31
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,…

Django works just fine. If you want to build your own framework (e.g. use Bottle) then go for it. Waste [Invest?] the time while the rest of us are busy getting things done. I don't think that you can compare ANY Python framework (or any framework in any language) with Ruby on Rails. If you write Ruby, use RoR. If you write Python, don't use RoR. Also, for anyone recommending something like Tornado, please stop. It's…

I tried to use Flask for a GAE project a few months ago. I stopped two views later, when I realized I'd started reinventing half of Django. I switched to Django for GAE at that point, and I'm very happy so far.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#97

Post by espeed »

StavrosK wrote: post #95
espeed wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much Django is dead as is using a relational database as the primary datastore is dying. Django (and Rails) both came from a time when the RDBMS ruled so they were built around an ORM and are very ORM centric. People are moving away from using a relational database and onto using Mongo or a graph database as the primary datastore. Graphs are a much more elegant way of storing relational data, and so I pre…

I'm pretty sure that, once you populate a class instance with your data, the rest of Django is usable with very few changes. It's pretty loosely coupled, generally.

Yeah, but most of the libraries that make up Django (and Rails), such as auth, are based around the ORM so if you don't use the ORM, you have a framework mismatch.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#98

Post by wisty »

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,…

IMO, Django had great documentation in it's time (i.e. the django book), which is why it's so popular; but the competitors have caught up, and people are questioning how good Django really is. The main advantages of Django are - lots of libraries, and the generic views. But I personally dislike generic views. They just feel a little like magic, and a little over-engineered. They might be good for larger projects, but using them from the start feels like premature overengineering.

I like Tornado. In the overview (http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation/overview.html), it gives you - auth (using OpenID), secure cookies, XSRF protection, templates, localization, UI modules (really basic, compared to generic views), running in prodution with Nginx, and aync programming. It doesn't have much database stuff (just a wrapper around MySQL), but you can use SQLAlchemy, or some other ORM.

Only the auth stuff feels over-engineered, because it uses async programming to call a general interface for Facebook OAuth, OpenID, Twitter OAuth, and so it's a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#99

Post by StavrosK »

mdasen wrote: post #90
philipn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is Django clumsy, inflexible or restrictive?

I don't want to be defending the OP's position, but. . . settings.py is a mess. Even Simon's written a post bashing it ( http://simonwillison.net/2009/may/19/djng/ ). I cringe a little starting up a project and having to dive into the settings.py file. In some ways, Django tries to be flexible, but it's clumsy. For example, you can have your templates in your app directories. So, you have /path/to/project/posts/templ…

After starting to read your post, I thought I'd be able to defend most of the things that bother you, but you're 100% correct. What especially bugs me is the lack of an initialization file. I needed one to put some signals (or some other functions, it's been a while) in, and there just wasn't anything.

It's a trivial thing to add, but its lack really hurts sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#100

Post by araneae »

I went through this "ror vs. django" thing a few months ago, and ended up picking up Django.

I got the Django book and liked it and I had no problems with my actual project itself in terms of having enough "community."

However, now I'm in the "figuring out how to deploy it" stage and it's been a real pain. My free webhost supports RoR and python, but doesn't have Django installed, I don't want to spend the money on a VPS, and while there's been a recent surge of beta Django hosts, none of them have worked out for me. (I.e. I tried out gondor.io, it wouldn't deploy, I asked for help in the IRC channel, someone said they'd "look into it" but never got back to me.) I'm currently rewriting my models (db structure) for Google apps since it's basically my last hope.

I really love Django, so it pains me to say this, but you might want to check out RoR.

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