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Better docs, not better code

Scott Yang took a look at both TurboGears and Django, and decided to go with Django. He talks about his reasons for picking up Django, but this section in particular stood out to me:

However, at this stage the only show stopper for TurboGears is its dependency on setuptools, which is not trivial to install on shared web hosts without terribly looking hacks.

On the other hand, Django works well without setuptools, and there’s even a how to for DreamHost. Documentation is considerably better than TurboGears (though you still need to look into the source code to work out the magic). It is also easy to integrate Kid and MochiKit into a Django deployment.

Once again it looks like a major deciding factor in choosing a web framework was not which system had the better code, better features, or most boxes in Web2.0 Bingo. It comes down quality of documentation and being absurdly easy to install and use. The devs on both teams would be wise to take heed.

I’ve mentioned this before: here and here.

Update: Please see Scott’s comments below for some clarification.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Django, TurboGears, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Better docs, not better code”

  1. Scott Yang Says:
    December 15th, 2005 at 12:09 am

    If you read my post you’ll find out that one significant deciding factor is ease of deployment, i.e. I don’t need to play around with Python Egg to get Django running on a shared box. I don’t want to settle on one frame work, develop the app, and then later on find out it cannot be deployed on my cheap-ass web host (I know I should spend more :)

    Something with good documentation and is quick to get started will definitely be valued at the first look — but quality code and good features are also important. I might have very different opinions after digging through enough code :)

  2. John Says:
    December 15th, 2005 at 12:17 am

    Oh, I definitely agree with you. :)

    I didn’t mean that code doesn’t matter. Nor that a framework could lack key features and make up for it with pretty docs.

    I just think with the proliferation of Python web frameworks with similar feature sets (in the broadest sense), being “easy to use” is going to be a key selling point.

    Either way, please keep posting! I’m sure a lot of people would like to follow along with your experiences. :)

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