Which framework offers similar functionalities to ADO.NET Data services

Question

I am new to both Django and Rails. I am thinking of developing an Web 2.0 style application and is planning to expose Restful services, which my UI tier would call to make CRUD operations (Something similar to ADO.NET Data services)

I am yet to decide on the platforms and is looking for some advice on which one to side develop on?

I am currently thinking of Ruby on Rails or Django.

The benefit of using DJango / Python is that I can move to google AppEngine in future with some code changes, but on the down side I hear DJango is not RESTful.

I am also new to both Ruby and Python. So, what would be your advice on which platform to use?

Answer 1

Django is fine for REST applications. Rails claims to provide some functionality to that makes REST easier, but it is largely inaccurate - things like human-readable URIs don't really matter to REST. Rails auto-generates POST/GET/DELETE/PUT stuff for you, but it's just as easy to do in Django too - and it really doesn't have much to do with REST, either, it's just proper HTTP usage.

REST is a general type of architecture, it has very clear constraints, but there is no one, single way to do a REST application. This is a good discussion by the architect of REST, Roy Fielding, on some common misconceptions: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven

I recommend Python and Django, but not for REST-related reasons. (Better documentation, a saner API with Django, less nasty monkey patching and black magic, less coupling, etc)

Answer 2

Well if you want to couple the view and controller with REST then you are right that django is not RESTful, because with django you would have to (de)serialize django objects and manipulate that by yourself in the front end using your favourite javascript framework. Saying that, if your only concern is to send and receive data RESTfully without caring how to do it, then django should be sufficient for you since you've already got your heart for it.

Answer 3

A RESTful interface is used for building distributed applications. Does your UI tier and services tier really need to be physically separated? Seems overkill to me.