Django was recently mentioned in an article at OnJava.com. It is great to see that Django is on the radar of some people in the industry, but it still does not seem to garnish the same amount of attention as Ruby on Rails. I sometimes wonder why this is, and I have come up with the following.

1. Django's lack of a release version. Although this is not true anymore as Django has released 0.9
2. Ruby on Rails was first on the scene. Event though Django was being developed at the same time as Ruby on Rails, it was not made public until a while after RoR was already gaining popularity.
3. Django's lack of Ajax. RoR is almost synonymous with Ajax, which brings with it a lot of flash and hype and Web 2.0 buzzwords. Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of Ajax but Django lacks the same one to one relationship that RoR and Ajax has. Ajax support in Django is coming but it is still vague as to what it will be.

You should notice that none of these things are of any detriment to Django at all. I just wonder what else we can do to push Django more into the spotlight. As a Java developer by profession who does work with Django on the side, I have really come to appreciate the benefits of the agile programming framework that Django and Python provide. With books like Beyond Java hitting the shelves I think more and more people are starting to agree.