Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, the Rails Envy guys, have made their mark on the web programming community through their amusing videos in which they take Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV ad format and use it to poke fun at other programming languages and frameworks in the name of Ruby on Rails advocacy. In the past, they’ve lampooned:
- Java
- PHP (on the topics of migrations, organization, changing the database and the Cake framework.
- .NET
Their latest video takes on the Python-based framework Django. This is a tricky comparison, as both:
- Are built on dynamic programming languages that currently have considerable developer mindshare (Ruby from Rails, and Python from Guido’s working at Google)
- Are based on the Model-View-Controller pattern
- Make use of Object-Relational Mapping
- Follow the DRY Principle
- Were extracted from real live web application projects
The approach taken by the Rails Envy guys in this installment is an interesting departure:
In the blog entry accompanying the video, Gregg writes:
After taking a good look at Django and weighing all the pros/cons, I didn’t really think we should make fun of it. Django is a great framework for building web applications, one that employs many of the same techniques that Ruby on Rails does. If it wasn’t for Rails I’d probably be programming Django right now. Amongst a sea of mediocre web frameworks it’s definitely close to the top.
In a time when one of the problems with Rails is that of the “arrogant bastards” (as Chad Fowler put it at the opening keynote of RailsConf 2007), it’s refreshing to see this sort of thing. Nicely done, guys.
