Rails vs. Django

jesusphreak has a pretty good writeup that's worth reading on the pros of using django: http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_django

Having come from a rails background and later switching to django I think it comes down to a matter of preference. Django's ORM gets the job done but leaves something to be desired (ugly syntax, no multiple database support, also watch out for implicit cascading deletes!). Conversion to using SQLAlchemy was supposed to address the gaps, but the branch for the upgrade seems pretty dead... But overall I'm pretty happy due to the transparency of django's framework code. I've implemented some customizations that would have been a lot harder to pull off in rails.

If you had to choose a python web framework, I'd suggest taking a look at pylons which is more flexible (also, by default it uses mako templating which > django's templating and supports SQLAlchemy).

Deployment of Rails sucks.

Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact, it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's just a new stack of problems.

Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is an example of this, but I'm no expert).

Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst. But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.

That and whether you're more comfortable using Python or Ruby.

I went for rails myself, and agree about Mongrel. It seems like the Rails guys are all anxious to throw the Apache baby out with the bathwater, and spend a lot of time fooling around with dodgy ways of doing things.

For now, I use the mod_fcgid Apache module, and it seems to work ok for what I need.

Rails looks to be more DRY than Django. Though I'm on Rails and don't really use Django.