From Django to Rails

Recently I've done some Django development for the company I work for. It was my first real delve into web design and daunting as that was to me, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use. Coming from an enterprise background I always thought of developing web applications as a lengthy process with lots of planning and forethought.

In previous jobs the database migration for an application has been involving at least four people and tens of scripts in order to run the changes in. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing at all, depending on your stack but surely there is a slicker way of doing things.

Enter Django, and it's models as descriptor files within the application source itself. Oh I'm sure this is the same in other older frameworks but it's my first experience of this. Being a grumpy, not so old (yet) man I just want to see things working when starting out with something new, and the Django docs are quite nice, with a four part series of getting up and going with your first Django app.

A couple of weeks later (cut me some slack - it was my first web app) I was running away with the little app in my environment and starting to integrate different scripts and systems with it. I was quite pleased with myself and believe it or not some other developers are starting to take the code and do some work with it.

Last weekend I wanted to pilot a little project to look after a client database, holding details of different services that they had received. Having used Django before my knee-jerk reaction is to jump straight into it and get the models written and get up and running. But I held fast and checked out Ruby on Rails.

I had been hearing a lot of chat about this framework from other guys at work who had just started a project with it and I was really keen to check it out. Again wanting to get something up and running really quickly I started with the first guide on the website. I was very surprised at the low entry cost of getting something up and running. I went from nothing to setting up my environment to running a web app entering data and changing the color of the background of my page in a couple of hours. I have to say I was very very impressed.

That was only getting up and going from nothing to actually being able to play around in my development environment, taking it one step further I decided to supplement what I'd done with another guide which in my opinion is much more complete coming from an engineering perspective. It runs through getting set up with source control and getting your app deployed into a running production environment as soon as possible.

In particular the Heroku setup was exceptional, as a engineer who is trying to streamline the release and deployment process as part of his day job this process is something to aspire to. With a couple of commands the code is under source control, deployed to a running server and you're able to view the logs, all from your command line.

The problem is now is that I really want to go back and re-write my Django app in Rails :(

Well not so much code stories

hmm, code fabulae, or code stories? Well not so much I guess - this will be just random blurb from whatever mood I'm in at the time. Why Latin? Well it makes me look intelligent doesn't it??? I even went to the trouble of looking up the plural of it.

Today's post, well it's my first blog post so it's just a place holder for me to see what it all looks like and have a play around, but I have been meaning to do a blog for a while now and I would encourage everyone to have a go I suppose. If only for myself to go over and see some of the trails and tribulations that I will undoubtedly have with my job.