My opinion, as posted there, was pretty immediate and only going off of surface values. I just saw in Django what I had seen too much of in my own code. I've written similar things in Zope and Formulator that did all sorts of fancy automatic 'admin screen' generation, DBMS CRUD statements. I even applied those same tricks to LDAP with some success. So some of what I saw with Django reminded me of code that I both loved and hated - it made my data management work easy, but it was ugly and hard to navigate and maintain, and I could never remember even my own shortcuts and options of what to have in my nested dictionaries and lists and tuples that defined all of these structures.
It was also an all-too-quick response in that I perceived, wrongly, that Django was another Rails clone. I was quickly corrected on this, and believe I posted a correction later. As I've said in some other posts on my site - I don't really care much for the Python "Web Frameworks" which go off and try to mimic the technology of the day. I've been through competing with Perl, with Servlets, with J2EE, with PHP/ASP, and now with Rails, and just about every implementation I've seen of these has been underwhelming, to say the least. I myself am guilty of writing an early WebObjects inspired toolkit back in '96. Django is its own thing, and I give it credit for that. Some recent changes to the Django model syntax make it more palatable to my tastes, but I doubt that I'll personally be leaving Zope 2 or 3 for any of these systems any time soon. Zope / Principia / Bobo have all served me well for nearly a decade now, and Zope 3 makes ZODB based Zope development so easy and powerful that I hope to never have need of an ORM system again. These ORM tools like SQLObject and ActiveRecord still seem best suited for writing applications from scratch. Ian Bicking and Django people both have stated here that you can "conveniently generate SQL/DDL to populate the DB". If that's the situation, an object database like the ZODB or Durus may work just as well, without the translation to SQL and back. ORM only gets interesting to me these days when I have to map to to large scale pre-existing systems, and even there I'm having better experiences with other styles of storage to application data translation, validation, security, and management. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
