Django or Rails

May 18, 2010 | Comments | Permalink

There is enough material on the web that talks about why Django / Rails is better than the other, I liked this comparison the most. For me the key differentiators were the following two:

Documentation - Django tutorial followed with the detailed documentation available at their site is simply amazing!!
Development Effort - The admin screens completely sold Django to me. It saved me lot of initial effort to design, develop and test screens for models!

The other things that I considered:

Learning Curve - Lots of tutorials available for both Python and Ruby, I personally feel if you have a good command on any programming language - picking either one of them is a piece of cake, at least to get started with
Support / Forum activity - Looked like Ruby fairs better on this one - both have a good presence
Performance - Although Python has an edge, but the difference was not that critical for my application (being a B2B)
Integration with third party apps - Python has the edge over Ruby on this one ... although if you just compare the number of plugins available for each framework - Rails faired better

Clearly my objective was to pick up the framework that would do most of my work and had enough help / docs available to sail me through with little effort. As of now, with some bandwidth, I am thinking of picking up Rails and writing an application that would display the search results powered by Solr. Will do this development in parallel to Django and do a more thorough comparison!