My experiences were a little different. I came to django via PHP. I had known Python for a while although I had not done anything substantive with it. Developing Web apps with (raw) PHP had been frustrating in the PHP 4 and early PHP 5 days, things must be a lot better nowadays. Attempted to learn Symphony and Cake but they did not go down so well for me. 

Django made a lot of sense within a very short time and made Web development more fun and simpler. Found generic views, the routing mechanism and the automatic admin interface very very neat. The ORM and the templating engine are also adequate for most purposes. In all fairness, I think writing django apps is just writing another Python program.

The biggest argument against django has been that it has pretty useful component that cannot be used outside it because of their high coupling with the core of the framework. Like you cannot take the admin module without using the ORM. Again, it is almost unheard of to find a developer using django-forms or the ORM in another project that is not based on the framework. 

People say other frameworks like Pyramids (formerly Pylons) is more flexible though it has a higher learning curve. Bottle and flask are lighter and simpler but they are more manual in my opinion. 

Martin

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 10:51 AM, Joseph Wayodi <jwayodi@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:30 PM, Nd'wex Common <flexycat@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well yes I know the subject is rather funny and yes, python is a programming
> language while django is a framework based on python, however, django is
> like a whole new language...
>
> if you have come from planet java, grasping python is like a walk in the
> park, try walking into django and the ground gets shaky if not upside-down,
> its like starting all over again.
>
> thats my take, whats yours?
>

I also came to Python and Django, via Java.

You might also want to check out Flask [1] (maybe after you learn
Django), if you want to better understand what goes on under the hood.
It looks a lot like Django on the outside, has a gentle learning curve
and excellent documentation, has a small core, and is easy to mix and
match with third-party libraries and frameworks [2] [3].

[1] <http://flask.pocoo.org/>
[2] Flask extension registry: <http://flask.pocoo.org/extensions/>
[3] Flask snippet archive: <http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/>

Joseph.
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