Rails vs. Django

by Zef Hemel

An interesting comparison between Ruby on Rails and Django:

Ruby on Rails (”Rails”) is the dominant web programming framework for Ruby and, even outside the Ruby community, is considered the epitome of the latest generation of high-productivity, open source web development tools. Django is one of many competing web development frameworks for Python. It is notable, first, for being highly regarded amongst Python programmers, and second, for being one of the few of the new generation of frameworks that does not ape Ruby on Rails. Both Rails and Django claim greatly enhanced productivity, compared with more traditional web development frameworks.

In this paper, we compare the two frameworks from the point of view of a developer attempting to choose one of the two frameworks for a new project.

I myself am a Python fan. Although, I just realize haven’t written a single line of code for months, I’ve written poetry and essays about literary pieces, but no code. Quite a change. But ok, that’s beside the point. This paper (hosted on Google Docs, by the way as you can tell from the URL) is an interesting read. Recommended.

Photosynth

by Zef Hemel

Since its inception I’ve watched most episodes of ScobleShow. A couple of days ago I saw an amazing demo on there. It demonstrates Microsoft’s Photosynth. Photosynth is an amazing application that manages to combine hundreds of pictures into a 3D-like environment. It looks a-ma-zing.

You can download and watch the video demonstration here. You can download the Photosynth preview itself for free here (Windows required).

Google Acquires Jot

by Zef Hemel

It’s been a few days already and I don’t think it was seen as a huge deal, but Google acquired Jot. Jot is a company that creates the Jotspot product which is by far the nicest wiki software out there, if it still can be called just a wiki. Jot goes further with the wiki concept than just text with hyperlinks between them. It allows users to structure data and create simple database-like applications in this way. In Jotspot which was upcoming before the company got acquired they extended the idea of a wiki beyond the concept of pages. They allowed to create wiki calendars, photo collections and other things that I cannot remember. Jot has the vision of allowing normal people develop software in a visual and simple way, a vision that I find very interesting.

And now Google acquired them, which is really cool. Jotspot always was a paid product and according to the Google take-over FAQ it will from be free from now on (as soon as they migrate to Google’s storage platform). So: good news. I left my e-mail address them and can’t wait to play with it and use it when they’ll start taking new sign-ups.