Faster Development Rails or Django?

Question

I have around 2 Weeks of Real development time to churn out a contact database system to replace various spreadsheets and pieces of paper laying around.

Also I need to develop two websites (with dynamic content) and a small AJAXian web service.

I have no experience of rails or django, but I can learn fast.

Both claim to be all about the fast development.

What is it that rails has that django doesn't have and vice versa that would accelerate the development of this application?

Also the contact database benifit more from the admin panel (dj) or the scaffolding of views (ror)? (there will be a lot of CRUD operations)

Answer 1

The Django admin will generate a CRUD application that you can customize to suit almost any need, from your model definitions. I've used the admin for the main user interface for several projects and can tell you that it is a real timesaver. You don't have to spend any time whatsoever at writing templates or Javascript.

Django also has generic views which can do object detail, list views, update or delete on any model without you worrying about the logic of the app. You just supply the templates, hook into the urls and you're basically done.

For deployment I'd say Django and Rails are now equal. Rails has been painful to deploy, but things have changed greatly.

For a simple contact database the admin might be the biggest difference between Rails and Django. And the fact that you can run your Django project locally, with a real webserver without any configuration ('python manage.py runserver').