Django V.S. Rails Part 1 – It’s all About the Admin

First, you need to know that I am NOT a programmer. I say that out of respect for those that program in Python and Ruby all day and who may have more to say about the issues that I struggle with and how I do my job.

What you will find in this ongoing series are my observations and ideas about both rapid development frameworks and why one might use them. I will be completely subjective and if you need more information you can always contact the different projects themselves. The point of this will be a perspective that is not geeky, but might help project managers and team leaders make development platform decisions.

As a developer (yes, I know I just contradicted myself) I MUST find things that make my life easier. As a designer, I need to know what tools I have available to me. I was teaching a class the other day to a bunch of high school students about CSS and standards based design. In the class I let them know that you can no longer be a designer without knowing what the tools are and how they work. I am constantly playing and learning.

When Ruby on Rails came out I was excited. Then I tried to install it. Ouch. This is not a hobby for me, so if I cannot start playing and seeing the benefit quickly chances are I won’t be back. In the meantime I stayed with PHP and got everything out of WordPress that I could.

But the last few years have started to change the game. Now EVERYONE has an API and sites need to contribute to the collaborative environment of the web. And this calls for a more robust platform for developing website. And to be honest, the projects I am working on now are not really websites, but are online applications.

Around the time that the needs of my clients and projects started to ramp up I was told about Django. I was told that Django is the Python version of Rails. I was familiar with CakePHP, one of the PHP answers to Rails. I found the support for Cake pretty arrogant and not very helpful. However, that may have changed in the last year.

Rails seemed like the hot framework, so I decided I need to learn Rails. I got Rails installed finally. Thank you Paul Sturgess!. Not so bad this time. I bought a book and got started. It was actually fun. Development has always been a considered and serious endeavor for me. But Rails and this book made it fun. All of a sudden I had all kids of new ideas. Ideas were giving birth to new ideas. It was exciting.

But then someone showed me the admin for Django. I was stopped in my tracks. What I was looking at was a beautiful, flexible and powerful UI that would use your setup to control your content. It was wonderful. Where is this feature in Rails? It doesn’t exist.

So, I started playing with Django.

Loved it. Similar reaction. Excited about projects, excited about possibilities. But now I ALSO had a proof of concept. Once I got my database structure setup, I was rocking and rolling. I could show the concept to someone, or launch an admin and let the team start adding content while I continued with the design and functionality.

For me… for now… Django is an awesome solution for building an app. I can build a real solution, with real features in darn near real time.

More coming soon.

In the meantime, check out this video.

Ask your questions in the comments.