Comments on: Why I switched to Pylons after using Django for six months

By: Bob S.

Bob S. — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:30:04 +0000

I am inexperienced in all of Python, Django, and Pylon. I’ve spent too much time with Joomla and found that there were too many instances where I was hacking away at something that had lines and lines of PHP code that I did not understand.

I spent years working as a C programmer working directly with Unix source code so I am very experienced at programming. I am looking for something that can either let me work at a very low level on a few select problems but on a very high level for most things,

I’m still looking.

What about Web2py?

By: Michael Short

Michael Short — Sun, 02 May 2010 15:40:28 +0000

I originally started a project of mine in Django only to find out that the ORM couldn’t handle the types of queries that I needed to perform. Not only that, but the ORM in Django forces it’s own database conventions on developers. I realize that you can hack SQLAlchemy into Django, but after testing Pylons it was clear that I needed to rewrite my application in Pylons.

Django gets far too much praise compared to Pylons IMHO. The ORM wasn’t the extent of my problems either. Deploying my project with Django was an absolute nightmare.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:51:04 +0000

I hear where you’re coming from. I’ve been using Django for almost a year now and produced two substantial apps in it.

Overall I’m happy with Django, but my #1 gripe is how tightly the user model is integrated with the framework, and how inflexible this is.

This is a part of the Django learning curve that just doesn’t seem to go away: I now have to start work on an app that must support multiple authentication backends (including even some that _gasp_ don’t use passwords and/or have their own additional UI), multiple “user profiles” and multi-tenant (ie, “sites”) — and the way these concepts are abstracted in Django makes me want to cry. I dread having to hack Django to the point where it will work for me, not against me.

OTOH, given my investment in Django, switching over to Pylons feels like major surgery. For instance, I’ve finally gotten the forms thing working the way I want (also an API with a lot of stuff below-the-waterline…), and I don’t exactly relish reinventing this from scratch on Pylons… But I guess I will take another look at Pylons before continuing with Django.

By: There’s nothing wrong with apps

There’s nothing wrong with apps — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:55:55 +0000

[...] random chatter lately about the trouble with reusable apps in Django, succinctly epitomized by this remark from Luís Pedro Coelho: “the app system is not the right system to break up [...]

By: ksamuel

ksamuel — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:27:24 +0000

The real trouble is that django, because is so simple, let beginers in the illusion that everything is simple. Reusable app is not simple, and that’s why most of the dev get it wrong.

The app paradigm is not the problem, maybe the name is misleading, but you can do exactly the same thing than with a plugin or such, providing you know what you are doing.

This is true that because Django makes a lot of magic, most dev don’t know what’s really happening. The trouble is that they don’t try to know, while in Pylons you are forced to.

But if you really know how stuff works, then you can do anything : it’s just Python.

I agree that SQLAchemy is so much better than the Django ORM, but it’s good enough, let you generate forms and the admin. It’s worth it.

Eventually, all the nice debugging features of Pylons can be obtained using, you guess it, apps ! For an ajax debugger, install werkzeug and django-extensions, and you are done.

Django is good for complex website too. It just implies to do the work you’ve done when learning Pylons far later in the learning process. When you think you have mastered Django, it’s time to understand how it works and how you can tweak it. And then, there is no limit.

Django is simple for the simple cases.
Django is complex for the complex cases.

Just like Python is, if you think about it.

By: Random Links #152 | YASDW - yet another software developer weblog

Random Links #152 | YASDW - yet another software developer weblog — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:57:02 +0000

[...] Why I switched to Pylons after using Django for six months Django vs. Pylons [...]

By: Omar Gomez

Omar Gomez — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:47:47 +0000

Never been a Django user, but I think Pylons achieves at having a great balance between flexibility and complexity. At first sight Django appears to sacrifice the former for the later.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:41:39 +0000

Django is better for simple sites? How so? I’ve built some very complicated things in Django. We built the Texas Tribune in 4 weeks with Django, and it is not a simple system. Admin alone saved us weeks, if not months of development time, which you won’t get with Pylons.

I think both Django and Pylons are great frameworks, but your inability to make something happen in a particular framework because you didn’t read the documentation is not a shortcoming of the framework.

By: Naos

Naos — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:21:53 +0000

sklep.optionall.pl is a 100% Django app, online payments, carts, orders, full text search, etc, not so simple.

By: Łukasz Korzybski

Łukasz Korzybski — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:03:45 +0000

When you use some gallery application and you need to send twitter update on photo insertion, you shouldn’t modify the gallery application. Just much much better solution is to use signals (events). Create some module in your app that will glue gallery app with your functionality using django signals, and you’re done.

Events are almost always better imho to glue reused apps than putting the custom functionality into one of the apps involved in the interaction.