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Just got a new website project for my company internal use. The whole website isn't that complicating but requires quite a lot of real time interaction. Basically, it's an interactive time line table where we can freely drag and drop each elements to move and resize them.

At first I wanted to use this opportunity to learn Python+Django (I'm given a huge amount of time) but then I read around and a lot of people mentioned Rails is better for creating rich interactive website.

So, for a website with a lot of drag & drop interaction like this, is Rails really the better choice? Is Rails built-in ajax that much easier to work with compare to Django+jQuery? How flexible and customizable is Rails' built-in ajax? I want to learn RoR just as much as Python by thee way.

Panupat
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I don't think AJAX functionality will define which framework you find yourself preferring.

I can't answer most of your question relating to ajax, but still think this post could be useful for you: it's highlighting a huge difference between ROR and django -- mainly RoR uses magic, django doesn't.

I prefer django for exactly that. Others may prefer RoR for the same reason I don't.

What's wrong with "magic"?

Rails' developers are of the opinion that this sort of "magic" is a good thing because it makes it easier to quickly get something working, and doesn't bore you with lots of details unless you want to reach in and start overriding things.

Django's developers are of the opinion that this sort of "magic" is a bad thing because doesn't really save all that much time (a few import statements isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things), and has the effect of hiding what's really going on, making it harder to work out how to override stuff, or harder to debug if something goes wrong.

Both of these are, of course, valid stances to take, and generally it seems that people just naturally gravitate to one or the other; those who like the "magic" congregate around Rails or frameworks which try to emulate it, those who don't congregate around Django or frameworks which try to emulate it (and, in a broader sense, these stances are somewhat stereotypical of Ruby and Python developers; Ruby developers tend to like doing things one way, Python developers tend to like doing things another way).

So I think one will click for you regardless of out of the box ajax support.

Community
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Yuji 'Tomita' Tomita
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    For what it's worth, Rails3 has far less "magic" involved than previous versions, and all you're calling "magic" is convention over configuration. In other words, for J Penguin's benefit, if you don't want to have to manually configure certain things you can follow a default pattern and they'll work automatically -- OR -- if you don't want things to "magically" work you can simply define them manually. It's not like a big black box, you can easily inspect any part of the Rails application framework or just read the API docs if you want to know what anything does. – Andrew Jan 29 '11 at 18:14
  • I really like that description of ROR vs Django. As someone who uses Django but hasn't yet used ROR, it's good to know that django framework does fit my style better and what to watch out for if I try ruby's later. – NuclearPeon Mar 22 '13 at 20:23
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Speaking as someone who mostly works on Rails, I would say take a day with each framework, follow a "getting started" screencast or tutorial, or pick up a book. ( For rails, I recommend Beginning Rails 3 ). Then, keep going with whichever one you feel more comfortable with.

One amazing resource rails has is Railscasts. Railscasts almost single-handedly converted me from PHP to ROR. I don't know if Django has a similar volume of quality screencasts available or not.

All frameworks are pretty heavily focused on the server-side of the equation. Now, Rails has a lot of things that help make writing views (your drag and drop stuff) nice, such as HAML (a fantastic template language)... and while I don't know enough to post links I'm sure Django has similar helpers. It's worth noting that both Django and Rails can use jQuery or any other javascript framework.

But, in the end, just by the nature of the web as stateless, there's going to be a degree of independence between your client-side templates and javascript, and what's serving that from the server side.

The real question you should probably be focused on is: Do you want to become a jQuery ninja, or do you want to scale up a notch and focus on Javascript itself, perhaps using tool suites like MooTools or Prototype. Your drag and drop stuff is client-side, so that's where your toughest decisions will have to be made.

Good luck!

Andrew
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I used to worry about things like this and would try new frameworks all the time because people would say it was a big improvement over the last one I was using until I realised I wasn't doing anything. Now I just pick one and stick with it. The fact that I know it much better than any others means I am more productive, even though the other frameworks probably include nice little tricks and shortcuts, and because I know it better I can debug problems faster.

Basically what I am trying to say is that just about every popular web framework can do everything that you want it to. Some are better than others but what really matters is that you become an expert in at least one of them. Being able to dabble in lots is not helpful, you really need to know one inside and out. Committing some code to the project helps this process.

Cromulent
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Mainly depends on which programming language you prefer to work and most comfortable with. Some prefer the flexible syntax of Ruby others like the cleanliness of Python. Also need to take into consideration the production environment (aka what OS is it going to be hosted on).

Chris Ledet
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  • Probably our server will be running windows server 2008 R2. I have read that Ruby performance is like 10x slower running on windows compare to linux, is it really that bad? – Panupat Jan 28 '11 at 18:08
  • Yes, it is very slow. Well, let me say that it's really Ruby 1.8.7 that's having the performance issues. When I tried switching to 1.9.2, my apps were faster but a couple of my gems were not too happy with 1.9 so I had to go back. =/ – Chris Ledet Jan 28 '11 at 19:16
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Django does not do interactive web applications, it is agnostic to the whole "frontend" part, this is done in Javascript with little to no support from Django (except for transferring data from AJAX calls).

So if you want to use Django for this, you will have not only to learn Python but also to learn loads of Javascript.

I like this solution as hand-written Javascript feels a lot clearer than any of these generating tools to me, plus there are plenty of libraries that make writing advanced Javascript GUIs a breeze these days, check out Jquery UI or ExtJS.

From there, the server side will only be AJAX calls that (de)serialize data in JSON, nothing else.

stephane k.
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Both Rails and Django are good. Try them both out and see which you like better.

yfeldblum
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