Django seems to be the new craze these days like Ruby on Rails was some time ago. The adoption of Django seems to be rising each month while Ruby seems to be quiet. So what exactly is Django about?
Django was developed by a group of developers with a budget restriction. So they made use of things that were free – chose Apache as the webserver, mysql as the database and python as the programming language. That’s all good and it gets even better because Django is sort of like Model View Controller (MVC). Why sort of? It’s just because the view is not really a view; you need to have a template (the real view) associated with it. From the looks of it, it’s quite easy to program in django, however when you’re used to certain programming language like C#, it might not be so obvious.
The problem with Django is that you really need to know Apache or Linux. At the moment, it is not widely supported. So if you have built your website in Django and want to publish it, you might run into problems because chances are that your hosting company doesn’t know how to get Django to work and if it’s shared hosting, they probably won’t give you access to modify the server properties. If like me, you’re not really into that apache stuff, then it will be more of a problem because apache needs to be configured a certain way. On top of that, django does not serve media files from what I understand, so your images, videos, audios and style sheets will have to be passed on to apache through another configuration. I personally find it hard to believe that the guys who developed django said it was meant to make web site development faster and cheaper.
When programming in django, you will have to use the command line utility extensively to create projects, compile etc. It’s like going back to the DOS era. There’s no IDE specific to django at the moment although you could get plugins to highlight the syntax. It’s like programming in notepad with no intellisense.
Personally I don’t think Django is the right choice for me. It can be for other people but the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages for me.