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I am currently trying to decide between Rails and Django..

At the moment the I'm finding ruby much more elegant so my only reason for considering Django is the admin panel..

I have no experience of either but i have to develop an application fast to meet a deadline.

Is there a way in rails to generate a (close to production ready) set of views for all of your CRUD actions based on your model like the admin panel in django? (ie it would look at your model and see that you have a person that belongs to a group and generate a dropdown for that grouop on the create person view)?

If not which is the quickest way (without manually writing) to get a first draft of all the CRUD views?

Thanks,

Daniel

Daniel Upton
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8 Answers8

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interesting tool http://activeadmin.info/

SpX
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    I would recommend Active Admin. It comes with a brilliant DSL to customize the entire interface – dexter Jul 30 '11 at 13:27
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You might want to take a look at the RailsAdmin gem.

Arie
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Answer in several parts:

  1. for something similar to Django admin, it all depends on what you plan to do with it. If you want to build your site around it, scaffolding is good. However, even if you chose Django, don't build your site around admin. It is not meant for this (it is possible, but after you'll have very little flexibility), it is just made for being an admin interface.

  2. This being said, if you need to work fast, and have no knowledge in Python nor in Ruby, I would go for Python - Django. Rails can be awfully productive, but the learning curve is much steeper than Django's. And Ruby's syntax is very fancy, but Python's is neater in my opinion (I know some will disagree on this!)

sebpiq
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  • Agreed. Python+Django is way simpler – Nimo Feb 24 '15 at 08:33
  • I should note that for internal use, django-admin is perfectly fine to center around. I've worked on multiple large government department projects that made extensive use of the django admin and whilst the learning curve is a bit steeper than regular django (Find a good book) , its incredibly customizable. Django admin was really just designed for quick and easy database views for content management, but as it found favor for intra-net type jobs, it has been expanded and maintained well. – Shayne Jun 09 '16 at 06:37
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Here are some popular choices of admin interface gems for Rails.

More choices at The Ruby Toolbox. ActiveScaffold is the most popular according to Ruby Toolbox, but it seems like it's not compatible with Rails 3.0.

htanata
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I really enjoyed using https://github.com/pilu/web-app-theme. Simple, ready to use, can spit out both erb and haml.

Tadas T
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administrate_me is a good choice, it definitely has the 'feel' of the Django admin.

Gonzalo
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Rails has a scaffold generator, which is neat to quickly sketch things out, but it has little by way of an Admin generator that's as nice as the one Django provides. That being said, it is quite easy to do most of those things fairly quickly with Rails. Take a look at the Rails tutorial. I have found it to be the fastest way to learn rails at the moment really. And the link I have included for the scaffold generator should get you using the code generation tool in rails.

Anukul Veeraraghavan
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    I used both Django and Ruby on Rails. Both are very easy to use, but I found django was much more simple (I wasn't familiar with ruby language and was new to python as well). You can use Rail's scaffold option but if you want the admin, you should probably give django a try. – Lin Dec 01 '10 at 10:12
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There's a really fast admin panel type thing that's now available -- The Brick. This one auto-creates its own models / controllers / views when any existing ones are not found, and does this entirely on-the-fly in RAM.

Not as configurable as other panels, but it's lean and works with all manner of Rails associations -- of course the common belongs_to and has_many, but also polymorphics and single table inheritance.

Lorin Thwaits
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