BEbelak·Sep 9, 2019
For me, I prefer Django, but I haven't used Rails in a number of years. In general I prefer Python over Ruby because it's more explicit and less magic, but Ruby definitely has its conveniences.
That being said, I am not a Ruby developer, I am a Python developer, so I'll try to address these points as best I can from the other side of the equation.
* Authentication - this is fairly simple to address. It's a fairly easy-to-use pluggable backend. It's not very hard to write a system to replace the default which would let you log in using other credentials. Also, a few years ago you couldn't replace the default User model - that has since been changed.
* Asset pipeline - fair point, but I prefer to keep my assets separate from the backend if possible - my current work project has a backend API in django with a separate frontend repo with all
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the JS/CSS
* Configuration - the best solution for this I've found is django-environ[0]. Alternatively, the built-in `DJANGO_SETTINGS_FILE` environment variable lets you specify a different base config file.
* Sidekiq/Celery - The API, I'll give you, however it's fairly easy to configure Celery to use Redis
* Mailer previews - I've used mailhog[1] before. This gives you a local mailbox to test with and will be closer to your final configuration anyway.
* Better security - possibly by default, but I haven't had any issues with django-rest-framework in the past
* Testing - pytest with pytest-django is also great to work with.
* Django ORM vs ActiveRecord - I don't have a ton of experience with ActiveRecord but I like the Django ORM. There's also SQLAlchemy, but it's a bit odd to rip that out of django if you don't need to.
I like Django because it's solid out of the box, but still provides a way to extend the core to be as flexible as you want. I assume it's possible to do this with Rails, but that's not my area of expertise.
I do appreciate you outlining things you like better as opposed to just saying "Django is terrible". I'll definitely have to try Rails again and see what I think of it now.
[0] https://github.com/joke2k/django-environ
[1] https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog