Hey Reader,
If you are looking to enter the world of web development, the choice of framework can be an important technical decision. If you are looking to expand your skill set, it will be good to know that both frameworks are powerful and quite enjoyable to use. Both Rails and Django are very accessible frameworks, and easy to get started.

The first major difference between these frameworks are, Django is written in Python and Rails in Ruby language. Both frameworks are MVC frameworks and are also free, open source projects.

Programming language Comparisons:

In terms of ease of learning Python, has an edge over Ruby due to its better code readability and syntax and the fact that it is simple to understand. It would be an easy pick for beginners for getting started.

The demand of Ruby in the market is higher than Python. Even though learning Ruby is tough, it has better usability of the two.

Ruby is a more object oriented language compared to python. The main advantage of using Ruby is the gems libraries. There is a huge inventory of available gems that make every task easy. Programmers need to be least worried about the basic functionality of web development like CRUD (create, retrieve, update and delete) operations and can focus on the main logic.

Framework Comparisons:

Both frameworks are open source, and use the model–view–controller (MVC) architecture to simplify the creation of web applications.

Rails focuses on allowing programmers on the major logic and design rather than the language fundamentals and syntaxes, this makes Rails more programmer friendly.

Django on the other hand, focuses on the coding fundamentals. Also Django can be stated as beginner friendly because programmers would get their grip around the fundamentals of the language.

Naming Conventions:

Rails use a lot of name conventions. Rails naming convention is linguistic:

• Model names are singular
• Controller names are plural
• View names are plural

Django models are just Python classes, so the Python naming conventions are applied. Modules should have lowercase names. Python packages should also have lowercase names.

Installation

Installation of Django is fairly simple and can be completed within a minute. On a linux system, create a virtual environment and run:

pip install -e Django

On the other hand, for installing Rails, the process is little longer. The installation process lasts close to half an hour. To start with, you have to understand what a bundle and gem actually is (both are used to install the packages for ruby). Both bundle and gem needs to be installed, then run the command:

gem install rails

HTML Templating:

Within both frameworks, templating is an important feature. In Rails, the base template is called a layout while the individual page templates are views. With Django both base template and individual pages are plain templates. To render dynamic content, both frameworks function differently. Django uses a simple templating language so that web designers with just HTML skills can build templates. In contrast, in Rails views uses in-line Ruby code fragments. Therefore, Rails views appear more complex than the Django templates.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML):

Rails assists the sending and responding of AJAX requests using the support of many helper functions. Rails to JavaScript or commonly called RJS template generates scripts by the browser in response to an AJAX request.

Django provides JSON, YAML and XML serializers to assist with AJAX requests. Here developers have the choice to select their preferred JavaScript code and library to send and respond to AJAX requests.

Community Support

Rails is extremely versatile and have a very strong community around the web development framework. It has a large pool of developers, books and great open-source libraries.

Django, in most cases, is highly criticized for its inactive community support. Django have very little online forums and developer support.

Conclusion:

We can clearly see that both Rails and Django offer roughly the same MVC frameworks. Rails is comparatively the bigger framework. Rails has better community support. Django even though the smaller community it is supportive and you can get plenty of information online and the documentation is sufficient to answer your queries. For beginners, Django is a great starting point.

When it comes to deciding which to learn, your personal preferences as well as the application scope are the most important factors to consider which framework to go with.

My pick is Ruby on Rails. Drop in your selection in the comment box below.

Cheers
Harsh Agarwal