RoR has all the buzz these days in web development land, and for good reason – it’s a fantastic system for building database backed web-apps. Proponents of other languages have been bringing out a variety of similar MVC-based webstacks in response (or at least, lots of them are getting discussed now that RoR has all the buzz – all ships rise on a rising tide and all that). They vary widely in quality, quantity of documentation and ‘readiness to deploy on,’ and I definitely haven’t had the time to dig into all the ones that have been coming out, but I’ll mention one in particular that looks promising, especially if you see learning Ruby as a barrier to entry for Ruby on Rails. Django is a Python-based web framework that emerged out of work the developers did for a variety of consulting projects. It distinguishes itself from a lot of the other emerging frameworks in that (like RoR) it’s been in production for a couple of years. There are also a few decent tutorials out for it. I ran across a pretty insightful comment about RoR as compared to Django, which described Django as a CMS toolkit as compared to RoR’s as a webapp toolkit.

There’s one significant barrier to entry with Django – they’re building off of mod_python and Apache 2.x – if like me you’re still working off of Apache 1.x this can be a deal killer. Still, this is worth monkeying around with, especially if (again like me) you find Python world’s easier to read and write than Ruby.