Ruby on Rails Vs Django Community
One of the most important factors for adapting to open source technology is the community behind it, and while PHP seems to be falling apart as I see with multiple frameworks and scattered focus, Ruby have taken off with their Ruby on Rails application, and Python followed them with the open sourcing of Django. Both frameworks seem pretty good. I have tried Ruby on Rails for practice and am pretty much impressed with it, while the issue of internationalization and proper unicode support remains a dangling issue, and Globalize is a nice work around but implies too much over head on the database as I see.
Anyways, all I said above is a quick shallow opinion of the matter, and truth be said I don’t have enough knowledge to really judge which one is doing better. My comparison here is based on the community and interest of people in the two frameworks, RoR and Django. A look at Google Trends comparing searches for “ruby on rails”, “django”, and “python django” as django it self relates to much more than the programming framework. This is what you get:
Sorry I had to shrink the image here to be able to display it. Click it for large view. As you say, while django refers to much more than just the framework, Ruby on Rails still is getting more searches for, thus implying a more public interest so far, and truth be said, in terms of marketing at least, Ruby on Rails are doing a great job and have strong fan base behind it as I see it. Search for “python django” falls much lower, but it’s probably not a fair comparison as most python programmers would search for Django straight. Another nice thing to note is the high News reference to Django on the other hand.
A look at the language interest it self, Ruby Vs Python shows how Ruby are drawing more attention with time, and you can also see the jump for python in 2005, when they most probably revealed their own version of Rails, Django.
The last comparison I did was for the two framework sites on Alexa, and the results again favor Ruby on Rails but with a sinusoidal weird pattern that has fallen a bit hard just at the end, compared to more steadily Django lower one.
Again, these results only reflect the public interest in the framework so far. Some people, my self included, would feel a lot more comfortable with a strong community already around, but Django has its advantages that could draw some attention. I personally am trying to master Ruby on Rails, but the lack of i18n seems to be pushing me to work with Django as well, which I am sure would be a great framework as well. Maybe then I would be able to give a more detailed comparison between the two.
What do you think?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Most Popular Posts:
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
Marzouq: Ruby on Rails documentation is really neat and it’s syntax is quite appealing to me. Nice to see people in Kuwait aware of the two frameworks. As many people don’t. Also, nice to talk to ex-silicon valley workers :)
Alas, you didn’t have a garage and become millionaire it seems.
I’ve tried both frameworks. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really comfortable with either one. I suppose it’s mostly because my projects aren’t that huge to be needing a complete framework with models and stuff.
I guess I’m just old fashioned :) I use plain ol’ PHP with Smarty and simple SELECT queries to populate an array. Honestly, it seems like that’s really all I need in the internal projects I do for work.
I also like PHP ’cause it’s really close to Perl too!
Ruby’s syntax destroyed me mentally :(
hi everyone,
I’ve tried ROR in 2006, and to be frank, I didn’t like it. I would perfer Java all the way long.
yes, ROR is simple and easy to use, but I simply can’t see how to build an enterprise level application out of it. it could deliver in small apps similar to PHP, but not the big ones that requires intergration with back-end systems, Enterprise-level error handling, distrubited transcation, ..etc.
also, I don’t like the syntex of ROR and the way the framwork works
in the other hand, I love Python. in fact, I would say they Python is the best OO scripting available right now. however, I never worked with Django, therefore, I really can’t say anything about it. I looked at Django’s site and read some of their documentation, and I really didn’t like the way they are doing things.
I guess I’m just old fashioned :), like Bojacob, I like to do it with Java, the smart and easy way. I know some of you would disagree, but this is life ;)
I was looking for some framework about 2 years ago, i looked at almost all php frameworks first since i know php. I fell for Solarphp (alot of zend framework originated from this) but after a while i felt that it was far from complete and i also found alot of magic that i didnt like. So I thought, what the heck ill just ditch php, since i was coming to dislike it more and more when managing large projects. I chose Django and i have now worked with it intensively for about a year producing some 10-15 commercial websites using it, some projects have been really big and some not. Django is getting better every day and people coding it are really talented programmers. For deployment i use mod_wsgi and apache which is working really good and fast. I feel i have no reason to look else where for a framework, i dont really miss anything in django, i just miss django when working in something else. And the plus is python, vey usefull for other stuff than webprogramming.
Obviously I haven’t been checking my own blog for sometime, apologize to all contributors.
Bojacob: Yeah, Php for small quick projects might be tempting. But after a while, and when you want something easy to modify on the go, now I can’t even imagine doing it the old way.
Adel: Hi man. I assume you know me and I know you :). I think you did not use RoR for what it was meant to be. RoR is not a large-scale enterprise solution, and it does not smoothly support scaling up shall you go under heavy load. RoR works best for small-medium web based solutions, just like Django I would assume. But JRuby have been adapted by Sun to replace Java as an interpreter in their JVM, so being adapted by Sun for Java means it has a potential for enterprise usage.
On the other hand, Java is my love for large enterprise application, and that only. For a good simple reason. Java is heavy, and difficult to use for on going frequent changes. Most hosts are Windows, or LAMP. Java ones are more expensive and limited. For building a medium sizes web application, Java would consume too much time, effort, and usually money. I am not comparing the money here to .Net I am an open sourced person :).
Thanks for your comments though.
Mikko: Well that gives me a bit of a relief as I am forced now to use Django because of lack of i18n in RoR and their way of handling Unicode as bytes. I would love to see some reference sites if you don’t mind, and a good host recommendation is definitely needed.
I like Ruby language more than python, but I like the explicitness of django… hope there’ll be a django-like framework in ruby in the future *sigh*
johnny: I am just working on django documentation as I read your comments. I have to say, so far, django syntax seems cleaner to me, but Ruby seems to have more power and more flexible. Django is amazing with it’s administration interface. Then again, I’m just starting I can’t judge that early.
I am much more familiar with Ruby the Django since it was released during the time I used to work in the silicon valley. The reason why people like Ruby on Rails is because it had very good documentation to start with for an open source technology.
The main thing is that it had a built up of a community before being released to the public so that is my Ruby had a huge jump in the beginning, but I’m not very familiar with Django so even my opinion pretty much is based on one only, now only time will tell.