[Grok-dev] Grok or Django?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Jeroen,

Much as I'd like to convince you Grok is the way to go and Django isn't, 
I'm quite sure Django's up to many tasks.

I'm not really able to make a case for Grok here and I'm not going to 
try. Which development framework to pick is in large part a matter of 
taste.

Django has the benefit of a larger community than Grok does. It being a 
large community there is a lot going on in it. It uses patterns and 
approaches (a relational database, basic installation story) 
comprehensible to a wide range of developers.

Django comes with an automatic UI (the admin UI) which is probably only 
of limited use in many use cases, possibly including yours. It also has 
a lot of high-level out of the box bits in Pinax.

Grok has the advantage of a community with quite a lot of experience and 
very advanced tools and patterns (buildout, component-style development, 
an object database). These tools and patterns will attract some more 
experienced developers who know that an application may have to grow and 
expand over time, and who appreciate software reuse. They are also 
"different", meaning it's harder to attract many developers.

Grok doesn't come with an automatic UI. It comes with tools and patterns 
to build very flexible user interfaces, but it doesn't have so much here 
out of the box.

The attitudes to engineering will differ. Grok tries to combine the best 
of both worlds - the ultimate flexibility, fine-grained component and 
reconfigurability driven approach that the Zope community tends to 
appreciate, and the "it works out of the box as an integrated whole" 
experience people want to just get things done. Sometimes it ends up 
with a compromise, not doing either as well as frameworks leaning into 
one direction strongly. Django is mostly about the latter.

I'll make a point in favor of Grok: I suspect a more mature response to 
questions like this typifies the Zope community as a whole. The culture 
of the Django community might be different (though I'm sure there are 
many mature responses in that community too).

Regards,

Martijn