Grails vs Django

Grails is an abstraction over Spring and Hibernate. This makes Grails applications fast and scalable. This is because both Spring and Hibernate are themselves scalable.

Grails is a full-stack web framework, not just MVC. It contains a lot of stuff out of the box, but it doesn’t enforce it. It contains over 900 plugins which provide a Groovy API for a lot of useful and well-known Java libraries. And what is more important is that they are super easy to install!

Setting up a new project is quite fast and code generation (scaffolding) saves you a lot of time. It also uses a convention over configuration principle which helps you bypass all the configuration trouble.

Grails also comes with a reloading mechanism out of the box.

Grails is designed to be a rapid development framework with a straight learning curve. It advocates convention over configuration. Extensibility is very simple when using plugins (there is a lot of them). One command in the console – and all the dependencies and configurations are managed for you.

Do you need something advanced in the UI? You can either create it in GSP with an addon of CSS/JavaScript or you can find a plugin that will do the work for you. Plugins include integration with Bootstrap, jQuery, Yeoman and much more.

The Documentation section is actually a wiki, which can be modified by any logged in user. It has an official manual, tutorials, screencasts, a sample app and much more. If that does not do it for you, then there are countless third-party tutorials, more than 12k questions on SO and much much more

Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly.

Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model.

Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API.

The official Django documentation is probably some of the best around. Well written, thorough and they explain every little detail of the framework. Django is also a very popular tool, with an extensive community and a lot of experienced developers that have been using it for years. This means that there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there for new and experienced developers alike.

Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out.

Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy.

Django was first released in 2005, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins.

Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors.

Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command.

This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application.