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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#111

Post by ladyrassilon »

mnutt wrote: post #103
ladyrassilon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had to google 'django magic removal branch' just because it sounded so cool: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/RemovingTheMagic I think your experience with Rails (and the community) may be a little out of date. Check out wycats' changes in Rails 3.0 to see where most of the cleanup happened. There's a lot less magic than there used to be. As far as authentication and admin sections, I guess it just depends on yo…

The simplicity and plugability of django's authentication system gives you as much as you need and as much as you want, if it doesn't provide something then you can reuse it. I can't think why I'd want to "choose" between different systems that should be provided in the core functionality.

The admin is not the auth system, you are not forced to use it and in fact its disabled by default in every single django startup app. I've in the past done my own functionality pages, and would use Admin when it was most suitable.

Personally I haven't seen anything in Rails 3.0 that makes me think "ooh this is a killer feature" the only thing that rails had over Django was migrations, and South closed that hole up years ago.

I'm going to to reinvestigate Rails 3 soon, however my concerns with magic are related as much to the coding style as the overal magical structure. One of the reasons I understand Django so well is the well written code, the other being that it is clean and well designed as a system.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#112

Post by ladyrassilon »

The best book I've found for picking up rails was the latest edition of the Agile Web Development book, which I actually own 3 different editions of it, for differing versions of rails.

The lack of a Django book, probably has more to do with the fact of the community being more focused on tutorials and Blogs rather than cashing in, although there are a few django books out there. That said with the documentation and tutorials out there I've never felt a great need for a missing book.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#113

Post by philipn »

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…

RE:

"I often have to manage images/css/js manually, figure out where to put them, etc"

This has (yay!) been solved in 1.3 with the inclusion of the staticfiles app. I now just put my app-specific static stuff in static/ and then run manage.py collectstatic and all is well in the world :)

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#114

Post by alexforget »

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 my experience, I found it difficult from time to time to do certain thing, but when you dig deeper you almost always find that the hooks you need and the functionality you need is already there.

I come to think that the Django team must have the Guido's time machine. If you need something, take a good look, the solution might be under your feet.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#115

Post by araneae »

robbles wrote: post #110
araneae wrote: post #100

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…

I think you'll find that any "free webhost" is going to give you a lot of trouble if you want to deploy a project built on a modern web framework. Rule of thumb: if it doesn't have SSH access, and it's not a Platform-as-a-Service like Heroku or Gondor, you're probably not going to have much luck deploying anything except PHP or static HTML. Check out webfaction.com, it's great for beginners and does most of the deplo…

My webhost has SSH access, it just doesn't give me root. It offers RoR through CPanel, which I just assumed would work, but I haven't tried using it so I don't really know.

But I take your point, a VPS is really the best thing. I just can't convince my husband to let me spend money on it and I'm unemployed :P.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#116

Post by TVD »

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'…

Sorry to say my friend, but the Ruby and Rails community out teaches the competition. Hands down! It's that simple. But, more importantly the founder of Rails has deliciously swirly hair. Can Django top deliciously swirly hair? I didn't think so: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509808

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#117

Post by halayli »

espeed wrote: post #106
halayli wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

micro frameworks provide incomplete feature set. You tend to reinvent the wheel many times. I see no advantage in using them when I can have something more complete and feature rich.

Because as your app grows and you need more custom behavior, you find that you start stripping out the full-stack framework features and you end up with using it like a micro framework, which it wasn't designed to be so you have now have a framework mismatch.

pylons is a glue framework. It allows you to replace whatever you want, easily and without losing other framework features.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#118

Post by code_duck »

mtogo wrote: post #61
code_duck wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Your steps aren't too difficult provided the new programmer knows MVC (sorry, Model-Template-View), regular expressions, ORM principles, basic database design principles, understand how migrations work and how to use south, django's template specifics, and is willing to wade through a maze of documentation for hours on end to find the solution to simple problems. I'm not noing to list alternatives because that starts…

What framework does not require one to understand those things?

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#119

Post by rabc »

Everyone talking about RoR and Django, but what about Scala? Does that a good language with a good web framework?

I experienced RoR and trying Django now, and thinking Django is much easier than RoR (Django configurations and conventions make much more sense for me), but seeing the same problems everyone talking here.

Meanwhile, Scala coming and a lot of services written in RoR or Django are now build in Scala (Twitter, Foursquare).

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#120

Post by wycats »

ladyrassilon wrote: post #111
mnutt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to google 'django magic removal branch' just because it sounded so cool: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/RemovingTheMagic I think your experience with Rails (and the community) may be a little out of date. Check out wycats' changes in Rails 3.0 to see where most of the cleanup happened. There's a lot less magic than there used to be. As far as authentication and admin sections, I guess it just depends on yo…

The simplicity and plugability of django's authentication system gives you as much as you need and as much as you want, if it doesn't provide something then you can reuse it. I can't think why I'd want to "choose" between different systems that should be provided in the core functionality. The admin is not the auth system, you are not forced to use it and in fact its disabled by default in every single django startup…

José Valim has written a book[1] that shows how to swap in all manner of functionality into Rails 3. It covers alternate renderers (PDF), alternate models, alternate template stores (SQL), custom template engines, using the built-in notification system, and alternate backends for I18n.

I highly recommend it.

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/jvrails/crafting-rails-applications

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