Django can reverse-engineer models from your database schema extremely easily. Once that is done it is 30 minutes (perhaps 4 hours for a novice) configuration and you have a working django admin site against your Rails DB.

This is how I started with Django, I migrated from hand-coded SQL to Django in one day (followed tutorial, found how to reverse engineer models and off I went).

See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/ for the reverse engineering bit. Tutorial starts here : http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/intro/

Give it a shot!

Yes and no. There have been some cool projects for Rails that provide administrative interfaces, but they all suffer from a lack of critical mass. Django's admin interface is just core to the framework - not because it has to be, but in the way that the core team sees it as something that can't languish.

On the horizon, merb-admin is being ported to Rails 3 by Yehuda Katz (http://yehudakatz.com/2009/12/31/spinning-up-a-new-rails-app...). If that comes to fruition, I think it might become a standard tool for Rails users who want admin pages. We'll see.

Being a part of the framework itself makes the Django admin interface always receive attention. Separate Rails projects do exist, but are often by one or a small number of people and not as widely used as the Django admin interface. So, they are there, but often don't have quite the polish and utility of Django's interface.

I can't say how good they are (as a guy that uses Django but takes a look at Rails about twice a year), but Google led me here:

http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_admin_interfaces.ht...

Typus seems the most Django-like.

Granted, a big advantage (as far as admin interfaces go) with Django is that almost every app uses it or at least keeps it in mind.

There's formtastic [1] to whip up forms according to the models. Using this and some DRY admin controller you can assemble an admin controller pretty quickly. Still, nowhere as fast as the Django admin. There are also some plugins to get an admin but they never did it for me.

[1] http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic