Media Grease

Lately I’ve been exploring different web application frameworks for creating websites that don’t fit neatly into the paradigm of content management systems. Generally that means websites that aren’t driven by traditional posts or pages, like news sites or blogs.

I’ve settled on learning what I can about three major players in the framework market: Django, Ruby on Rails and Code Igniter.

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, but I chose those three for a few basic reasons.

Django has a great built-in administrative interface for data stored in your database. Think about it as production ready version of Phpmyadmin. Django is also written in Python, which is easy to read and understand. Another strength is that Django’s performance is better than its primary competitor, Ruby on Rails.

One frustrating part of working in Django that I’d like to note is that official releases have basically stopped. Work on the framework continues, but none of it has been officially sanctioned since March 2007. The community suggests you install the development version. That’s not something I’m too keen on doing with a production website. Read Christian Joergensen for more on Django’s release problems.

Ruby on Rails is currently the rockstar of the framework scene. It’s written in the cool by cryptic Ruby programming language (that’s my impression coming from a C style language background). Rails has an active community with a large plugin repository and lots of great documentation. The big downside to Rails seems to be the complexity of deployment and sluggish overall performance.

Code Igniter’s main strength is that it’s written in the ubiquitous PHP. That means that deployment is a snap and your site can be hosted just about anywhere. The other big PHP frameworks are Symfony and Cake PHP but their documentation is just completely blown away by Code Igniter’s. Right now, the big downside to Code Igniter is that its database models implementation isn’t as strong as any of the other frameworks. So if you’re afraid of the nitty gritty database stuff, stay away from Code Igniter for now.