Ask HN: Where is the Django community? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#121

Post by mdasen » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:25 AM UTC

philipn wrote: post #113

mdasen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Awesome! I'd gone through the release notes when 1.3 came out and wrote it off since the release notes say "Part of the purpose of introducing the staticfiles app is to make it easier to keep static files separate from user-uploaded files." I thought to myself, "well, I'm going to be putting user files on S3 anyway so it's not going to get messy anyway."

I'd completely missed it. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#122

Post by donaq » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:26 AM UTC

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…

Django is just a Python package. You don't need root to install it, you just need it to be on your Python path. If they have virtualenv installed that's probably the easiest way to do it. Otherwise, look here:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/th...

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#123

Post by endtime » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:26 AM UTC

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…

>However, migrations are a tad fundamental.

FYI, I think the South authors are the ones preventing South being part of Django, not the Django maintainers.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#124

Post by shabda » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:28 AM UTC

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,…

> The community is pretty much dead.

http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?pli=1

20245 Members, 126619 Threads

Last 12 hours, 14 new threads, 27 new messages

https://code.djangoproject.com/log/django/trunk

16546 changes, last change 28 hours ago.

> ....Django projects ended up being a big mess,

Are you sure it was not the result of the team you worked with, and not Django itself?

Everything else is hand wavy, but if you would bother to explain "clumsy, inflexible and restrictive" technically, I would be glad to respond technically.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#125

Post by jemeshsu » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:46 AM UTC

The size of community for Rails vs Django does not really matters in your selection as both are big enough community. Choose base on your language preference Ruby vs Python as this is where you will be coding in. Learn the basic of both and decide then which is more suitable. I started with Rails/Ruby and switch to Python.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#126

Post by naithemilkman » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 2:54 AM UTC

rails and django are both extensions from the ruby and python community. if you know your programming well, you'll be able to grok it in whatever framework you choose. on that note, i'll bet my last penny python's community is more vibrant than ruby. ruby is essentially dead without rails whereas python thrives quite happily without django.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#127

Post by ehutch79 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 3:49 AM UTC

tghw wrote: post #3

I think part of the difference is that the Django docs are just so good, there isn't a lot I can think of that a book would add. DjangoSnippets.org is also pretty useful, as are the multitudes of Django apps available on GitHub and BitBucket. You can also hang out in #django on freenode. People can sometimes be a bit gruff with noobs (though what IRC channel isn't) but there are usually some good discussions going on…

The django docs arn't as good as they're made out to be, at least not any more. The major problem is they're lagging behind at this point, in both using the new core features such as class based views, and in best practices, such as the tutorial teaching reusable apps.

the core devs have said this themselves though on stage at cons, so i'm sure it'll get fixed at some point.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#128

Post by rhizome31 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 4:12 AM UTC

Yes it's true that the Rails and Ruby community is very talkative and innovative. I see a lot of projects being ported from Ruby to Python and not so much the other way around.

As for getting work done, in my experience Rails and Django are equivalent. The only thing against Rails is that it's slower, which can be a burden for development.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#129

Post by matthodan » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 4:26 AM UTC

Who is the DHH of Django?

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#130

Post by gtaylor » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 4:28 AM UTC

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #75

andybak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a third party application that isn't baked into the framework." In what way is this a bad thing? South has excellent support, code-quality and usage. The only thing that would change by building it into Django would be to tie it's release schedule to that of a much larger code-base.

Heh, I'm not bad mouthing south at all. If it didn't exist, I wouldn't use Django at all. Thank god for south. But I'm using Django DESPITE the fact that I have to use south. Contrast this with Rails, which FORCES you to use migrations (last I checked).

Why would I want to be forced to use South? There are other migration methods that approach the problem different ways, or perhaps I want to write my own?

Third part != Lower quality. In this case, it means being able to make incremental improvements outside of the Django release schedule. So while Rails bakes it in and forces a release schedule on migrations, South isn't encumbered by this, and is more agile.