Is there an ActiveScaffold equivalent for Django?

Question

A while ago I created a frontend for a database using RoR and ActiveScaffold. ActiveScaffold let me easily create lots of the features I needed: Read Only Access, Sexy Interface, Sorting, Advanced Search, Pagination etc. I would now like to do the same thing in Django. Is there any equivalent to ActiveScaffold for Django? Do I need to use the Django Admin Interface or is there something available that's closer to ActiveScaffold?

Answer 1

The Django admin app is the equivalent in terms of the out-of-the-box features it provides (sexy interface (arguable), sorting, search, pagination, etc). Ruby on Rails has REST API design as part of the model building process (which it calls scaffolding), so providing the JavaScript/AJAX scaffold is a reasonable builtin feature. Django on the other hand is perfectly ok with you building an app without an API.

Full disclosure: This next part is essentially a plug for some open source software I'm writing to implement what you actually want.

So I've always wanted activescaffold for Django. Django REST Framework is the way that APIs are built in Django, but it requires you to write serializers and viewsets for everything. I wrote an app called AutoREST that automatically builds your REST API based on model definitions and (optionally) the admin.py configuration. It works best with simpler models, and you can always override the url patterns with your custom API ViewSets and use AutoREST for all the easy stuff.

Once you have a REST API, you still need the cool JavaScript/AJAX table/CRUD stuff. I wrote an app for Django that provides a template tag to inject the JavaScript called django-rest-scaffold. It's based on a JavaScript library I wrote for rendering scaffolds for any REST API, rest-scaffold.js.

Answer 2

It may not quite have all the features you need, but I've been using (and quite enjoy) admin_data as a db admin interface - http://github.com/neerajdotname/admin_data

There's also: http://github.com/fesplugas/typus

Also, here's a comparison of the some of the various rails based db admin tools.

http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/07/rails-admin-interface-roundup/

Good luck.