Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app?

It has been my go-to web framework for the better part of a decade and I continue to be impressed with it. "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines" tagline is quite apt, as it has the highest combo of power and developer efficiency of any framework I've come across even today.

It is Python, which gives you the entirety of the Python ecosystem including all of the data science stuff and a bunch of Django-specific extras if you need them.

With the recent crop of Javascript-less tools like HTMX and AlpineJS you can do most things without any Javascript at all. Bootstrap or Tailwind both work great for CSS.

I still find the database ORM to be one of the most pleasant ways to interface with a datastore, and the migrations system usually makes database changes pretty easy. Can work with Postgres, Sqlite, mySql and a few others.

It has basically zero external dependencies besides one or two tiny ones.

I've been pleased with how easy it has been to keep Django upgraded. It feels like relatively little has changed in a backwards incompatible way compared to some of the frontend churn I've experienced.

It's widely used, and so it is relatively easy to find people who can work on a Django codebase compared to something more obscure. Django embraces convention over configuration, so if you've worked on one Django codebase you can probably work on another.

The documentation is excellent, and since it is widespread there is a huge amount of learning materials, articles, and Stackoverflow questions around.

Django has 16 years worth of work put into it and is extremely well tested. It implements a lot of the security things I have no interest in trying myself, like password hashing, sanitizing, etc.

Unless your requirements call for extreme performance needs or massively big data, Django can probably handle your workload just fine.

You can get pretty far with the base framework, and then if you need something else, consult the massive list of extras: https://awesomedjango.org/

Happy to answer any Django questions. Cheers

If you are already fluent in Python, use Django. PHP; Laravel? Etc. The benefit of using the “best” CRUD tool (if there even is one) is far less than the cost of learning a new language these days.

When Rails first came out, it was so much better than anything else that it was worth it to learn Ruby just to use that toolchain. Nowadays, the gap has closed for the simple use-case.

You can run Django/Rails & Postgres on Heroku with approximately zero infra burden. I still have a trivial app I last touched ten years ago and it’s still up and serving traffic.