I am a Django newbie: I have gotten my feet wet exploring Django and have started building my first serious application with it. I am having more fun with Django than I have had with any other software tool in a long time, and I would like to share a few things I have learned along the way so far, that might help other newbies. If you are a more experienced Django-neer reading this and notice areas for improvement or outright mistakes, I would be very grateful for the feedback.

As I suggested in an earlier post, I’d like to discuss the choices that we as software developers have when it comes to implementing applications. These choices can be as fundamental as your programming language, your choice of tools, such as your IDE, or the libraries you use, such as your ORM or AJAX choice. There seems to be a number of people who seem embarrassed by the amount of choice available; they believe there should only be one correct choice of a programming language, IDE, application framework, etc., and we should be able to objectively decide what these choices should be and use that set of tools from now until we retire. Of course, the choices they have objectively chosen are correct, and if you believe otherwise, then you should be treated with a mixture of pity and scorn.

We have all seen these religious battles rage. They are not new, and they will continue to flourish every so often. Most recently, the theater of combat is Ruby on Rails (RoR) vs. Django and usually close on its heals: Ruby vs. Python.