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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T07:38:16+00:00

I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as Django-like ease of web app development

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I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as Django-like ease of web app development combined with good deployment, debugging and other tools?

Django is a very productive framework for building content-heavy sites; the best I’ve tried and a breath of fresh air compared to some of the Java monstrosities out there. However it’s written in Python which means there’s little real support in the way of deployment/packaging, debugging, profilers and other tools that make building and maintaining applications much easier.

Ruby has similar issues and although I do like Ruby much better than I like Python, I get the impression that Rails is roughly in the same boat at Django when it comes to managing/supporting the app.

Has anyone here tried both Django and Grails (or other web frameworks) for non-trivial projects? How did they compare?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You asked for someone who used both Grails and Django. I’ve done work on both for big projects. Here’s my Thoughts:

    IDE’s:
    Django works really well in Eclipse, Grails works really well in IntelliJ Idea.

    Debugging:
    Practically the same (assuming you use IntelliJ for Grails, and Eclipse for Python). Step debugging, inspecting variables, etc… never need a print statement for either. Sometimes django error messages can be useless but Grails error messages are usually pretty lengthy and hard to parse through.

    Time to run a unit test:
    django: 2 seconds.
    Grails: 20 seconds (the tests themselves both run in a fraction of a second, it’s the part about loading the framework to run them that takes the rest… as you can see, Grails is frustratingly slow to load).

    Deployment:
    Django: copy & paste one file into an apache config, and to redeploy, just change the code and reload apache.
    Grails: create a .war file, deploy it on tomcat, rinse and repeat to redeploy.

    Programming languages:
    Groovy is TOTALLY awesome. I love it, more so than Python. But I certainly have no complaints.

    Plugins:
    Grails: lots of broken plugins (and can use every java lib ever).
    Django: a few stable plugins, but enough to do most of what you need.

    Database:
    Django: schema migrations using South, and generally intuitive relations.
    Grails: no schema migrations, and by default it deletes the database on startup… WTF

    Usage:
    Django: startups (especially in the Gov 2.0 space), independent web dev shops.
    Grails: enterprise

    Hope that helps!

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