I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.
I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.
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Sam Newman has posted a useful high-level comparison of Django and Rails on his site. In it, I think he hits on one little-discussed reason why these two projects are grabbing so much mindshare right now:
[Rails and Django] ... historically would have ended up being written in Perl or PHP - but ended up being written in Ruby and Python respectively.
When I heard DHH speak at OSCON, he mentioned switching to Ruby after giving up on trying to make PHP do the kind of stuff he wanted to do. Back in July I asked Simon Willison (of the Django team) about PHP; he said that both he and Adrian Holovaty had worked in PHP for years, but it was Python that "gave us the flexibility we needed to pull everything off."
In other words, Rails and Django are web frameworks for people who are sick of PHP. That's a big market.
On the other hand, it's likely that if those people stick around, the Python and/or Ruby communities and the emphasis they put on craft will have a positive influence on the newcomers. Worked for me. Python was the first language I got serious with after several years of PHP work, and the influence of the community was at least as significant for me as my prior experience in C, Pascal, Prolog, Forth, and whatnot.
Haha, very big market. I'm looking for stop using PHP after several years of playing and developing with it.
I love Python, but Dreamhost is putting me on trubble with Django... so I am considering Rails (again). Maybe someday I'll have the time to switch my PyQT apps to Rails.
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Copyright 2010
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media
Interestingly a large amount of people 'switching' to ruby and python because of rails and django are stillusing the new languages like hacky PHP apps. Movement to a new language/famework doesn't neccessarily result in an improvement in software quality - in fact the reverse can often be the case!