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My attempts to learn Ruby On Rails have fallen short. Something about it just isn’t clicking with me right now. So I thought maybe I needed to try looking into another framework to see if another would be better. Plus, coming from using PHP for all my previous projects, I love the idea of using a pre-built framework to make my coding life a lot easier.

Somehow, I heard about Django. I quickly skimmed the Django documentation to get a feel for what it was and how I would accomplish simple tasks that I had a vague idea how they could be done through Rails. Then, after some Google-ing, I found the Snakes and Rubies video.

Yeah, I’m a year behind, but it was still an enlightening video. Here are some things I learned from it:

• the Django guys really get a kick out of putting silly stuff in their Powerpoint presentations.
• Adrian Holovaty isn’t the greatest speaker. (Hey, I’m not a good speaker.)
• Simon Willison, in the audience, seemed to know more about Django than Adrian. (Maybe he should have spoken for Django?)
• Django is good for making newspaper-style sites, not web applications.
• Adrian likes to write Javascript. David does not. (I do not!)
• There is more magic in Rails.
• Django has a great admin framework built into it.
• David seems to have an answer for everything. Adrian did not.
• Rails is more MVC than Django.
• Django does database creation better than Rails’ migrate.
• There is probably more to say, but I can’t think of it all right now.

Somehow, after watching the video for over an hour, I still think Rails is the better choice for what I would like to do. It’s easier on the eyes. David is right; Ruby code looks beautiful. It is much easier to read and understand. Django, on the other hand, looks promising, but I think it may only be useful for building a customized CMS at this time.

I have even toyed with the idea of creating my own framework. But, no matter how much I think about where to begin, how to make it, and what language to use, I still come back to Rails. David developed it well.

I did another Google search on web application frameworks and saw that a few people were talking about Seaside, a framework built on Smalltalk. I’m not sure how I feel about these at this time. I may have more to say about these soon.

So, any ideas? Should I just stick with ugly ol’ PHP? Maybe I should look at what PHP5 can do. What are your thoughts?

Maybe I should just seriously learn C.