journal-2-3-11
This week I finished the Django tutorial and built a simple blogging app in Django. The app lets visitors create a blog which consists of a single text field that can be edited. When I start the test server the site can be found within the LAN at
http://jack.local/. The plan is to do the same thing in rails and possibly cakePHP for the mid-term project.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Django at this point. It seemed like about the same amount of work as just doing the same thing in PHP with no framework. I think this is largely because I'm so familiar with PHP and still in the looking things up that most people just know stages in Django, but I'm not sure. It's possible that a lot of things I did could have been done faster if I had known the shortcuts.
Despite not saving so much time, I do like the organization structure. The url structure for instance is very different from what I'm used to and doesn't really save time but it does keep things organized in central way. I feel like Django succeeds at separating out model, view, and controller into separate sensible pieces and enforcing DRY but doesn't give quite as much help with rapid development as I expected. Again this might just be because I don't know the shortcuts yet.
Jim:
You might want to next, as a learning thing, seeing what it's like to throw these into a cloud hosting environment, with code version management etc.
For rails, heroku would be a good one to try; for django, google apps would be analogous. Both are free for small deployments.
If Django was more widely available on hosting servers (and maybe it is, I should find out) I could see using the built-in admin app as really easy CMS for really simple sites that just need to be able to change a few pieces of content.
