Antonio Cangiano has pulled together some interesting stats on Django, the Python web framework, and proclaims that it has reached a tipping point:
Django seems to have reached its tipping point, that critical mass which will enable its momentum to skyrocket.
Antonio used a numbers of sources for stats, including irc, google groups, and the TIOBE Index, and ran a comparison against Ruby on Rails.
| Python/Django | Ruby/RoR | |
| irc.freenode.net | 517/382 | 354/298 |
| newsgroup subscribers | 12,457/8,178 | 6,935/13,355 |
| messages for March | 1,244 | 2,890 |
| TIOBE Index (+/- delta since March) | 7 (+0.70) | 10 (-0.11) |
Commenting on the results, Antonio says:
By looking at these numbers, without any pretense of being too scientific in our comparative methods, we get the impression that the Rails community is almost twice as big as the Django one, which sounds about right. On the other hand we also get that the Python community is larger than the Ruby one (confirmed also by the irc results above).
Python in the enterprise has typically been regarded as more suited towards simple automation tasks and prototyping. That may change if Django has in fact reached a tipping point, particularly with Python implementations that that run on .Net and the JVM. For example, Tristan King recently demonstrated running Django on Jetty (a servlet container written in Java), and Dino Viehland got Django running on IronPython.
The publishing world has picked up on the interest in Django, as Antonio notes in his conclusion:
In my opinion the strongest indicators of Django’s increasing popularity come from the publishing world. You’ll see many books in print for a given topic, only if their publishers believe that there is a large enough market for them. In 2007 the following two books were published: Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears
and The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right
(available for free online). 2008 has only just started and already there’s been one Django title published (Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours
), with two further titles lined up: Practical Django Projects
and Python Web Development with Django