Tane: Yeah, the paragraph on maladjusted communities that hurt their newbies was written with Rails in mind. I’ve never seen “You don’t want to do that” used seriously anywhere else, it’s sad that patronizing is considered acceptable.

As for the argument that Rails couldn’t have popularized js frameworks because jQuery is currently more successful – well, silly when I say it that way. Ford may be going out of business, but it did a lot to popularize cars. Before Prototype, JS was just seen as a bad toy language best to be ignored or used for pop-ups. I think the fundamental mechanic of Prototype, extending the built-in types, has been shown up by jQuery, but it was the first popular js library and showed that js shouldn’t be ignored. (Can you name one before it? All I’ve got is x.js, but it didn’t really go anywhere.)

Aron: I actually like that Merb was the result of strongly differing opinions. One of the things I tried to emphasize was that large communities are valuable because they can try more of these experiments.

I agree that picking tools by popularity is a mistake — if that made sense, I’d probably listen to [insert overhyped pop music performer] instead of good music. I said that community was important as tech, but you put it better when you say that projects need to cross a threshold of viability based on community.

And to write in general to the reaction around this piece: I’m a little sorry to have emphasized Django and Rails so much (though it did make it more fun to write). I’m interested in them as a case study in the importance and effects of community, not for a flame war. Thanks to the folks who saw through to that.

I have to say that whatever fighting goes on between the two camps really doesn’t affect me as a user of the frameworks. I benefit from any improvement and competition. I feel like the author’s post focuses on a noisy minority, whereas the majority just wants a good tool to get the job done, and will take it in whatever form it comes.

1) I think popularity or trend (by whatever measure) is a bad, bad way to choose a framework. A community does not have to be the largest to be viable. It only needs to reach the point where it is self-sustaining, where the codebase and community around it can survive without the founder(s). I think Django has clearly reached that point, so I wouldn’t hesitate to use it in production. (In fact, we are… along with Rails.)

2) Rails has had a broader influence in general, I agree. But I actually think this has helped both frameworks reach a point very very quickly where enterprise users are willing to adopt them. Remember how long it took PHP? Years and years. I remember reading endless uninformed critiques from IT managers saying… you know… it’s not ready… it can’t scale… it’s a toy… real websites are done in java… etc. etc.

3) It’s funny you mention Merb, because the Rails community is anything but unified on the direction of RoR. Merb itself rose out of a frustration by some Rails folks who felt Rails was getting too featureful, and too bloated. It might be a stretch to say this, but I think the Merb phenomenon is basically Rails developers influenced (directly or not) by Django — or at least the Django way of doing things. Less magic, more explicit, looser coupling among components, etc. So in a way, I might argue that Django has influenced Rails — and I think for the better.

The Merb/Rails merger also proves that, at least within the Ruby/Framework community, there is room for intelligent criticism and compromise. Now, if we could only find a way to bring that same healthy discourse to discussions outside our respective communities, we might have something.

But, I’m not holding my breath.

A) The documentation was much more concise and clear, and didn’t make assumptions.
B) The community members will more willing to take the time and explain themselves when I asked a question, rather than shout that I suck.

I also tend to find that the rails community is full of “rockstar programmers” who are willing to spout out their ideas and opinions to anyone who will listen, without actually sitting down and looking at the problems or actually providing any proof.

In terms of all the books for Django vs Rails, have you not heard the saying “Too much of a good thing”?.

Marco also makes a good point on the influence of rails – Rails users do tend to use Prototype more often in their code or examples, yet jQuery is a much more popular library. And, any rails examples I saw, developers were putting javascript code right into the page using onclick handlers. This is just bad practice and I hope one that has stopped.

Django is already successful, and Django’s success does not depend on Rails or having a larger community.

Rails has influenced web development much more than Django has, it’s true, but saying that it influenced graphic design, collaboration, js toolkits and distributed version control is just too much of a stretch. Would you say that Django influenced cloud computing because of Google App Engine? How has jQuery turned into the dominant js framework if Rails uses protoype? Is design influenced by code? Are you sure? Wikipedia was built in PHP, not Rails.

I can see where RoR influenced web developers, it was a fresh approach to a large problem, that proved to be quite popular. It influenced a huge number of developers that use not only Rails but other similar frameworks as well. That can be Rails way to measure success, but in my opinion success != popularity, and that’s why I chose Django and not Rails when I made the switch from PHP. It just fits my needs better and I can relate better to it’s goals.

PS: If Google Trends is any indicator, you’ll see that Django has been growing steadily, and Rails declining, so should we say that Django is a better choice mid/long term?

Now offer the last few years I have happened to stumbled over some Rails infighting and have been impressed by the verocity and lack of technical basis for those disagreements. I admire raw passion like that, but I hope that tradition remains a part of the Rails community and does not infect Django. We are all kind of too busy for all that.

So please feel free to take this tripe somewhere else. Other than that, the Django community response to this stuff is likely to get as impassioned as “whatever dude”.