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Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

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Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#61

Post by silviogutierrez »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #10
pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

Funny you mention templating, its one key thing I'd change about Django, that... and maybe scaffolding, I'd crank it up drastically more. My ideal enhancement to Django would be something like how Microsoft made Razor into Blazor... A template engine that can run purely on the back-end or purely on the front-end, replacing any need to ever use JavaScript, you stick to your native programming tongue if you will.

Nothing on the python side for templating will ever come close to React or things like that. I built https://www.reactivated.io specifically to let python do what it does best (business logic / backend) and render using React. But all still server side without the downsides of a SPA.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#62

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #58
pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

One of the biggest things I dislike about Django is its lack of a standard project structure. I haven't used it in years, so things may be different now, but back in the day, even the core team recommended against using the default project layout, which always made me wonder why they generated new apps that way. Switching between Django projects while doing contract work was always a "what the hell?" experience. Rail…

This is a bit of a head scratcher for me. I feel Django very much has a way in which projects are supposed to be structured. Maybe you do not like it, but if you ask me where the settings/templates/tests are stored, I could tell you immediately. In a bigger app, where you might want to break things apart, you have options, but it always struck me as you would maintain the existing structure (maybe debate a views/ with multiple modules in there vs views_x.py, views_y.py in the app root)

Unless, you are more angling at the project vs app distinction? Which does seem a bit of cruft. I only ever create a “core” app and put everything in there. Avoids any potential headache.

My only really basis of comparison would be Flask, which has basically zero standard. You can organize your app however you want. Given the barebones nature and need for third party dependencies, no two Flask apps will look alike.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#63

Post by brokegrammer »

pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

> The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all.

They wanted to provide safe and clean templating, so they decided to force developers to write tags instead of putting logic inside templates.

I agree it's quite overkill because I still want to run code like I would with ERB or PHP sometimes instead of being forced to write a tag. But this can lead to difficult to debug templates and security problems.

> The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Model.objects every time) for no good reason.

The idea was to make the separation between Model and QuerySet objects obvious. When you access the objects property on the model object, you're actually accessing the QuerySet.

It seems weird because in Rails, everything is encapsulated in the model's class. But Python devs tend to prefer explicit code. In Django we also have the Manager class as an additional layer used to build QuerySets. I'd say it's just a different architecture instead of a shortcoming.

> The lack of common project structure means that every project is different.

This is a real problem but I reckon that big Rails projects aren't as easy to navigate either because most don't stick to the Rails way as soon as custom business logic is needed.

I would say that Django isn't worse than Rails. They just decided to be more strict in some places, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the end, you just need to work with whatever you prefer.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#64

Post by ropable »

pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

I've used them both in production enough to feel qualified to counter these, but we'd all just be arguing for our opinions. Both are excellent frameworks, with no clear standout IMO.

I will say one thing in response: we've found it approximately 10x easier to find devs having years of experience with Python than with Ruby. That's a non-trivial argument in Django's favour in our organisation.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#65

Post by curiousgal »

adithyareddy wrote: post #39
9dev wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not originally a Python guy, but when I’m forced to work with Django, what I do for models and settings and such is just creating a barrel module, that is—instead of models.py, have models/__init__.py that imports (and thus re-exports) everything from every file in the models folder. Then I can have a single model per file, as it should be. I’ll never understand the conventions of Python land, but at least the la…

Zulip does this: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/main/zerver/models/__ini... Zulip in general is a great example of a large open source Django app that's been maintained and actively developed for a long time. I use it as a reference quite a lot.

Why are they using the as?

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#66

Post by x0x0 »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #6
pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

Python is used for much more than just web dev and Django, whereas Ruby seams to only be synonymous with Ruby on Rails. Do you think Rails is still worth using when investing in learning Python and Django has a much higher roi?

If you spend a bunch of time in Ruby (or Python), I don't think you'll have a huge lift switching to the other if you ever want to?

> Rails is still worth using

Yes. Hotwire + Hotwire Native are great tech. The whole suite is integrated in a way that Django isn't ime. I prefer the strong default approach for most things.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#67

Post by gmassman »

kshahkshah wrote: post #45
deaddodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never heard anyone but a Rails dev complain that it's "too verbose". Maybe not too verbose, but there's a large population of python devs that find SQLAlchemy (+ Alembic) the much better option.

That's curious to me honestly. I really prefer the ergonomics of Django's ORM compared to when I've had to use SQLAlchemy+Alembic in the past. I find alembic incredibly confusing and poorly documented. Not that documentation matters as much nowadays with AI

Alembic is certainly a bit of a challenge to grasp at first, especially if you want to do anything more complicated than create or alter tables. However, it does provide a great amount of flexibility if you want to implement more complex migration functionality. It allows library developers to add powerful features that would be very difficult to do with Rails/ActiveRecord or Django ORM. FWIW I maintain the flask-audit-logger package. It allows users to maintain audit logs of specific tables using postgres triggers. Being able to create custom migration operations is really an amazing feat. The alembic docs are quite dense, but the code is well organized and very readable.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#68

Post by ltbarcly3 »

Django is a framework made of several components:

  - ORM: bizarre and can't generate lots of common SQL you will want to generate.  Weird joins via counting underscores.  Horrible errors that don't make sense.  Lots of builtin functions have never worked and they won't fix them.  (ROUND has never worked!)
  - Template language:  Slow and borderline unusable.  are 50 pages of recursive nonsense tracebacks that doesn't tell you anything usable.
  - Web app (controller) framework: Terrible and inflexible
Each of these components is a piece of shit. Don't use Django.

I suggest:

  - ORM: Sqlalchemy: probably one of the best ORMs in any language, good performance and very flexible.  It won't get in your way much. 
  - Templates: jinja2: basically identical to django templates but faster and usable tracebacks are perfect
  - Web app: Flask or werkzeug, but there are lots of good options here.  Django is the worst.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#69

Post by thunky »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #62
innocentoldguy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest things I dislike about Django is its lack of a standard project structure. I haven't used it in years, so things may be different now, but back in the day, even the core team recommended against using the default project layout, which always made me wonder why they generated new apps that way. Switching between Django projects while doing contract work was always a "what the hell?" experience. Rail…

This is a bit of a head scratcher for me. I feel Django very much has a way in which projects are supposed to be structured. Maybe you do not like it, but if you ask me where the settings/templates/tests are stored, I could tell you immediately. In a bigger app, where you might want to break things apart, you have options, but it always struck me as you would maintain the existing structure (maybe debate a views/ wit…

> I only ever create a “core” app and put everything in there. Avoids any potential headache.

I agree with this, but the Django tutorial would lead someone to believe that you need a bunch of apps. So I've seen newbies create way too many apps without understanding why they've done it.

Re: Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer

#70

Post by theappsecguy »

ropable wrote: post #64
pmontra wrote: post #4

I'm working on a Rails and on a Django project for two different customers and I've been doing that for years now. I'd pick Rails over Django any time for every single feature. The absolute worst Django feature is the templating language. It seems to be designed to slow down developers to the like of old time Java web apps, almost mandatory templatetags et all. The query language is moderately bad, quite verbose (Mod…

I've used them both in production enough to feel qualified to counter these, but we'd all just be arguing for our opinions. Both are excellent frameworks, with no clear standout IMO. I will say one thing in response: we've found it approximately 10x easier to find devs having years of experience with Python than with Ruby. That's a non-trivial argument in Django's favour in our organisation.

Perhaps, but ruby is trivial to learn.
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