Django Vs Rails

[Jeff Shell]

My opinion, as posted there, was pretty immediate and only going off of
surface values. I just saw in Django what I had seen too much of in my
own code. I've written similar things in Zope and Formulator that did
all sorts of fancy automatic 'admin screen' generation, DBMS CRUD
statements. I even applied those same tricks to LDAP with some success.
So some of what I saw with Django reminded me of code that I both loved
and hated - it made my data management work easy, but it was ugly and
hard to navigate and maintain, and I could never remember even my own
shortcuts and options of what to have in my nested dictionaries and
lists and tuples that defined all of these structures.

It was also an all-too-quick response in that I perceived, wrongly,
that Django was another Rails clone. I was quickly corrected on this,
and believe I posted a correction later. As I've said in some other
posts on my site - I don't really care much for the Python "Web
Frameworks" which go off and try to mimic the technology of the day.
I've been through competing with Perl, with Servlets, with J2EE, with
PHP/ASP, and now with Rails, and just about every implementation I've
seen of these has been underwhelming, to say the least. I myself am
guilty of writing an early WebObjects inspired toolkit back in '96.
Django is its own thing, and I give it credit for that. Some recent
changes to the Django model syntax make it more palatable to my tastes,
but I doubt that I'll personally be leaving Zope 2 or 3 for any of
these systems any time soon. Zope / Principia / Bobo have all served me
well for nearly a decade now, and Zope 3 makes ZODB based Zope
development so easy and powerful that I hope to never have need of an
ORM system again. These ORM tools like SQLObject and ActiveRecord still
seem best suited for writing applications from scratch. Ian Bicking and
Django people both have stated here that you can "conveniently generate
SQL/DDL to populate the DB". If that's the situation, an object
database like the ZODB or Durus may work just as well, without the
translation to SQL and back. ORM only gets interesting to me these days
when I have to map to to large scale pre-existing systems, and even
there I'm having better experiences with other styles of storage to
application data translation, validation, security, and management.