Is Rails much better for interactive website compare to Django? - ruby-on-rails

Question

Just got a new website project for my company internal use. The whole website isn't that complicating but requires quite a lot of real time interaction. Basically, it's an interactive time line table where we can freely drag and drop each elements to move and resize them.
At first I wanted to use this opportunity to learn Python+Django (I'm given a huge amount of time) but then I read around and a lot of people mentioned Rails is better for creating rich interactive website.
So, for a website with a lot of drag & drop interaction like this, is Rails really the better choice? Is Rails built-in ajax that much easier to work with compare to Django+jQuery? How flexible and customizable is Rails' built-in ajax? I want to learn RoR just as much as Python by thee way.

Answer 1

I don't think AJAX functionality will define which framework you find yourself preferring.
I can't answer most of your question relating to ajax, but still think this post could be useful for you: it's highlighting a huge difference between ROR and django -- mainly RoR uses magic, django doesn't.
I prefer django for exactly that. Others may prefer RoR for the same reason I don't.
What's wrong with "magic"?
Rails' developers are of the opinion
that this sort of "magic" is a good
thing because it makes it easier to
quickly get something working, and
doesn't bore you with lots of details
unless you want to reach in and start
overriding things.
Django's developers are of the opinion
that this sort of "magic" is a bad
thing because doesn't really save all
that much time (a few import
statements isn't a big deal in the
grand scheme of things), and has the
effect of hiding what's really going
on, making it harder to work out how
to override stuff, or harder to debug
if something goes wrong.
Both of these are, of course, valid
stances to take, and generally it
seems that people just naturally
gravitate to one or the other; those
who like the "magic" congregate around
Rails or frameworks which try to
emulate it, those who don't congregate
around Django or frameworks which try
to emulate it (and, in a broader
sense, these stances are somewhat
stereotypical of Ruby and Python
developers; Ruby developers tend to
like doing things one way, Python
developers tend to like doing things
another way).
So I think one will click for you regardless of out of the box ajax support.

Answer 2

Speaking as someone who mostly works on Rails, I would say take a day with each framework, follow a "getting started" screencast or tutorial, or pick up a book. ( For rails, I recommend Beginning Rails 3 ). Then, keep going with whichever one you feel more comfortable with.
One amazing resource rails has is Railscasts. Railscasts almost single-handedly converted me from PHP to ROR. I don't know if Django has a similar volume of quality screencasts available or not.
All frameworks are pretty heavily focused on the server-side of the equation. Now, Rails has a lot of things that help make writing views (your drag and drop stuff) nice, such as HAML (a fantastic template language)... and while I don't know enough to post links I'm sure Django has similar helpers. It's worth noting that both Django and Rails can use jQuery or any other javascript framework.
But, in the end, just by the nature of the web as stateless, there's going to be a degree of independence between your client-side templates and javascript, and what's serving that from the server side.
The real question you should probably be focused on is: Do you want to become a jQuery ninja, or do you want to scale up a notch and focus on Javascript itself, perhaps using tool suites like MooTools or Prototype. Your drag and drop stuff is client-side, so that's where your toughest decisions will have to be made.
Good luck!

Answer 3

I used to worry about things like this and would try new frameworks all the time because people would say it was a big improvement over the last one I was using until I realised I wasn't doing anything. Now I just pick one and stick with it. The fact that I know it much better than any others means I am more productive, even though the other frameworks probably include nice little tricks and shortcuts, and because I know it better I can debug problems faster.
Basically what I am trying to say is that just about every popular web framework can do everything that you want it to. Some are better than others but what really matters is that you become an expert in at least one of them. Being able to dabble in lots is not helpful, you really need to know one inside and out. Committing some code to the project helps this process.

Answer 4

Mainly depends on which programming language you prefer to work and most comfortable with. Some prefer the flexible syntax of Ruby others like the cleanliness of Python. Also need to take into consideration the production environment (aka what OS is it going to be hosted on).

Answer 5

Django does not do interactive web applications, it is agnostic to the whole "frontend" part, this is done in Javascript with little to no support from Django (except for transferring data from AJAX calls).
So if you want to use Django for this, you will have not only to learn Python but also to learn loads of Javascript.
I like this solution as hand-written Javascript feels a lot clearer than any of these generating tools to me, plus there are plenty of libraries that make writing advanced Javascript GUIs a breeze these days, check out Jquery UI or ExtJS.
From there, the server side will only be AJAX calls that (de)serialize data in JSON, nothing else.

Answer 6

Both Rails and Django are good. Try them both out and see which you like better.