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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#161

Post by tommyg »

ryanbigg wrote: post #104
tommyg wrote: post #74

Rails 3.0 was released almost 1 year ago on August 29th, 2010 Django 1.3 was released March 23rd, 2011, about 4 months ago.

You are contrasting the versions incorrectly. Rails 3.0 may have been released then but the latest version of it is Rails 3.0.9, which was released < 1 month ago.

I was just interested in these books about the "latest" version of rails. Are they about Rails 3.0.9?

The Rails 3 Way - Published December 20, 2010, I doubt it includes the 3.0.9 release. Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial - Published on December 26, 2010, also doubt this book covers 3.0.9 Agile Web Development with Rails - March 31, 2011 - don't know about this one.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#163

Post by ehutch79 »

endtime wrote: post #150
ubernostrum wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? I don't think either "side" (if there is such a thing as "sides" here -- South's lead developer has a commit bit on Django) wants to just transplant South into Django directly. The plan, which got hashed out secretly behind closed doors in a shadowy back room (on our public mailing list), is to work the low-level support for migration-ish stuff -- APIs for DB manipulation, etc. -- into Django, but not offic…

Ah, my recollection was that the Django guys wanted to include South in a previous Django version (maybe 1.3?) but that the South developers didn't want that to happen. I had a quick look and couldn't find where I read that, and you seem to know better than I do, so I'll assume I'm misremembering something.

this was echoed at djangocon europe, they're looking to split functionality between stuff that every migration app could use (like generating alter statements, etc), and the actual tool itself.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#165

Post by Terretta »

KnightWhoSaysNi wrote: post #152
Terretta wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been writing web interactivity since before PHP, I'd disagree with you that PHP "is a language like Python". Look at how it started, as personal home page template processing scripts in Perl, and you'll see it started with much more in common with a templating tool or web framework than with a formal language. "PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking…

First of all, how it started isn't as important as where it is now. And what we have now is a full-fledged programming language. Secondly, if you can build large-scale maintainable websites with PHP, who cares how the language got started originally. It's all about what you can do with the language - and in that regard PHP is a great tool (although certainly not the only tool available).

"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way." -- Rasmussen Lerdorf, inventor of PHP

But to your point, he also said: "I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems."

http://twitter.com/#!/rasmus/status/1938080214814720

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#166

Post by philipkimmey »

Frankly, the discussion below turns quickly into bickering, but in response to your question, in my limited experience I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of the size of the community, though I think that has more to do with the prominence of 37 signals etc and less to do with any technical superiority.

I personally prefer Django for a number of reasons though I've also been impressed by RoR in my dabbling. active record's migrations are nice, and the ease with which rails let's you write dynamically changing forms and various other niceness is really great.

Technical questions aside, I think RoR is the default web framework. At general hacker type meet-ups like Startup Weekend, Rails is pretty much the default framework to work in as more people are familiar with it.

Django is wonderfully well structured and literally just about anything can be accomplished elegantly by subclassing this or that. As you said, the difficulty comes in figuring out what and how to fill in those gaps, which more often than not includes heavy use of grep and browsing around the Django source.

I think you'll be fine with whichever you choose. Learning new languages and frameworks is enjoyable, so try some rails and see how you like it. Smart people and great projects have been done with both.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#167

Post by AnthonyB3 »

hswolff wrote: post #16
chrisgo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many experienced developers use web2py and find it to be quite flexible and powerful. For example, see comments here (http://harrywolff.com/2011/01/web-application-development-fr...) regarding questions about function re-use and form customization. In web2py, I don't think the complicated stuff is generally any harder than it would be in other frameworks, yet many things are often much easier. Granted, though, sometimes documentation is lacking for some of the more complex stuff. A recipes book is due out soon, so hopefully that will help.
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