Bones' Blog of Stuff About Things

I hadn’t realised how long it had been since I posted anything. The break was unintentional and not really due to anything in particular. I value the writing practice that I get from blogging, and I think there is a benefit in the simple organisation of thoughts about whatever subject I choose to post about, so I’m a little bit annoyed with myself for letting it slip.

Having checked my server logs, I see that my last post was linked from some other sites and I’ve gotten some traffic from there. The post seems to have been mentioned as a RoR Vs. Django article, which wasn’t really the intention (there isn’t the detail and I don’t claim the knowledge to do that sort of comparison), but it’s nice that someone thought it was worth mentioning.

On that topic, I have been doing more RoR experimentation while I’ve been absent from the blog, primarily with a small project using it to display some automated documentation for some systems at work. The functionality is pretty straightforward, but it served to familiarise myself with the ins and outs of Rails development on a real application where I can’t ignore issues with deployment, presentation and the like.

RadRails continues to impress me as an environment, with only the terminal access causing me some annoyance in that it doesn’t actualy give you a terminal, rather some odd form-based command line that doesn’t seem to work outside of showing you what the standard generators are doing. In Rails itself, I’ve grown quite fond of the migrations, and a little bit tired of the issues with deploying it and even just running it on some Windows flavours (to be fair, this seems more a ruby/mysql issue).

So, whither Django? Well, I’m still waiting for the magic-removal merge. I occasionally check in on the Django mailing list and there’s plenty of activity, but from the perspective of the developer-user rather than someone helping with the framework itself, there’s not a lot of movement to be seen. I’ve just watched a video of a presentation by Jacob Kaplan-Moss where he promises that 1.0 is coming soon, so fingers crossed on that one. He also mentioned that they’re looking into the problems of schema evolution that migrations try and address, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

My immediate choice is whether to take the Django magic-removal branch now and update my existing code before I forget what any of it does or to just carry on with the two RoR projects I have going exclusively until Django 1.0 comes out. I’m inclined to wait, mostly because the two RoR projects have more momentum as ideas. However, the second RoR project is a good candidate for doing an actual Django vs Rails comparison by taking a subset of the app and implementing it in both frameworks. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m absolutely not an expert in Ruby, Python or web-application development in general, but my fumbling attempts might be educational, or at least amusing. One way or another, I’ll be trying to post more regularly. It’s for my own good, after all.