Rails for everything

Having years of experience in both, though not recently in rails, these are some of my thoughts:

Obviously Django ties you into python and its ecosystem while Rails means ruby (and its gems). The ecosystem is more important than the language. This can either impact your project a lot, or not much at all, depending on context.

Rails doesn't have the equivalent of Django's admin CMS. There are gems but Django is still much stronger. A lot of orgs have their entire CMS / administrated-by-staff part of the product written in it.

Rails, otoh, has a very powerful scaffolding cli. If you are proficient, you can generate some basic crud stuff in minutes from A to Z.

In general, I think Rails is at an even higher level of abstraction than Django. A lot of the architecture or structure is more or less given with rails, whereas you need to make a lot more choices with Django yourself. Routing is a good example. The 'batteries' that are included are also a bit bigger and seem to be in much more active development than Django.

Also a generalization: rails/ruby seems to value brevity and the DRY principle a lot more than is common in django/python. There's a split in taste on this, often python devs find the 'magic' of Rails rather frivolous and unreadable - even though django has a fair bit of metaprogramming itself, whereas Rails devs think the 'pythonic simplicity and straightforwardness' is actually rather crude. Or to be a bit more precise: in the rails world, code duplication seems to be thought of as a greater evil than semantic coupling.

I realize these are all quite subjective, and probably reflecting my own development experience more than being an accurate feature-by-feature comparison.

I just use Fly (http://fly.io) for toys... and it works pretty well. Have not tested at scale / reliability for a real thing.

Very accurate. Every programming language or framework has this kind of emotional attachment of enthusiastic users, to a certain extent. But nothing quite like Rails. Its in the culture.

> with scaffolding and other rails generators with custom templates is that really a big asset?

Yes, it is. Django CMS just hits that sweet spot where you can do almost everything you need for an administrative backend with very little customization. Because there is a convention of how things hang together, you are that much more productive. Its kind of a cms that you can throw together programmatically, it sits at a higher level than scaffolding + templates.

Honestly it feels, ironically, like a very rails-like thing to do (here's my model, you know all about it: now generate an admin interface for it!), except that in the rails world it would be unacceptably ugly (in various ways). But it is this very ugliness that prevents you from exposing it to consumers, or spending more time on it that it really needs, so it tends to stay in that sweet spot of being just good enough to do its job. It is very pragmatic and effective.

Is it a must-have? No, of course not. You can DIY an admin interface with rails very easily, too easily almost. However, the same thing can be said about pretty much anything that rails has got going for it: you can DIY in django/python too. And there is always a package...

Django admin also has various ways of filtering, search, navigation including menu's, pagination, permissions, custom actions and change tracking out of the box. Most importantly, it also includes ways to easily deal with relations (inline admins).

Last time I programmed with rails was many years ago, but none of these things are included in the default scaffolds right?

I understand the comparison with scaffolding, but I don't think they really overlap too much. You'd typically throw away a lot of the generated scaffolds from rails for a production app. They are more of a tool to avoid having to manually write boilerplate code, increasing productivity and (maybe) reducing errors. But django admin interface is meant for production, though often more as a backend tool than a customer facing interface. Different purposed. I miss the scaffolding in django and the admin interface in rails.