Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

plainframework.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 168 posts

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#41

Post by sroerick »

pbreit wrote: post #34
danpalmer wrote: post #10

> Plain is a fork of Django Why. This makes me sad. Plain looks great, but Django's strength is its maturity and amazing, enduring community built on contributions from thousands. Forking it will at best split contributions and mean infrequent merges, and at worst means Plain users lose out on Django improvements and Django users lose out on Plain patches. It seems like Plain could be just a set of Django packages kn…

Django's origins in content probably made it hopelessly "thick" in today's world which on the server is mostly just taking in a spitting out JSON.

I think there’s a counter movement here, whether it’s Hotwire/Turbo in Ruby or the Django community adopting htmx.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#43

Post by fud101 »

danpalmer wrote: post #10

> Plain is a fork of Django Why. This makes me sad. Plain looks great, but Django's strength is its maturity and amazing, enduring community built on contributions from thousands. Forking it will at best split contributions and mean infrequent merges, and at worst means Plain users lose out on Django improvements and Django users lose out on Plain patches. It seems like Plain could be just a set of Django packages kn…

I think Django is good enough to eat its babies but not good enough to evolve smoothly. It's been mentioned already but the task queue situation and the REST situation which are handled by Celery and DRF are not very ergonomic and well integrated than a default well designed system builtin into the framework like Phoenix gives you out of the box.

My main complaint is having used something like Wagtail (which builds on and extends Django) to quickly spin up a CRM is that if you come along years later to update a project you find the path very painful since Wagtail and Django updates diverge and you are left to your own bad choice of picking the path of least resistance. I'd rather just spend time building something in Django and then maintain that long term than try to keep two out of sync projects in sync while building on top of that mess.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#44

Post by yeswecatan »

brylie wrote: post #22
peternilson wrote: post #18

Django still lacks typing support. Does Plain improve on this at all? I didn't see typing mentioned in the docs..

Relatedly, in case it's useful, the django-stubs package provides mypy compatible type stubs for Django: https://github.com/typeddjango/django-stubs

While it's truly a great ongoing effort and I am grateful to all the contributors, it's not nearly complete. You may think you're using the correct type until, surprise, you are not.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#45

Post by danpalmer »

pbreit wrote: post #34
danpalmer wrote: post #10

> Plain is a fork of Django Why. This makes me sad. Plain looks great, but Django's strength is its maturity and amazing, enduring community built on contributions from thousands. Forking it will at best split contributions and mean infrequent merges, and at worst means Plain users lose out on Django improvements and Django users lose out on Plain patches. It seems like Plain could be just a set of Django packages kn…

Django's origins in content probably made it hopelessly "thick" in today's world which on the server is mostly just taking in a spitting out JSON.

This is a valid debate to be had (and I disagree), but I don't think Plain is changing any of that. It's roughly similar in structure.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#46

Post by phonon »

sroerick wrote: post #13

As a guy with a lot of hours into Django, I will echo that I don’t quite understand the “why” here. I think there’s a number of areas where Django falls a bit short and other web frameworks excel. For example, task workers are not first class citizens and require Celery or another task manager. REST APIs are a similar situation. Celery and Django REST are great, but they do feel a little ham handed. I’ve seen other f…

FYI https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/django-tasks will be included in Django once it is ready.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#48

Post by brokegrammer »

danpalmer wrote: post #10

> Plain is a fork of Django Why. This makes me sad. Plain looks great, but Django's strength is its maturity and amazing, enduring community built on contributions from thousands. Forking it will at best split contributions and mean infrequent merges, and at worst means Plain users lose out on Django improvements and Django users lose out on Plain patches. It seems like Plain could be just a set of Django packages kn…

I'm a Django user and I'm happy to see a fork because while Django is mature, it's also stagnating because the project isn't able to break things by introducing new features.

I don't think Plain will replace Django anytime soon but it might help guide decisions.

Plain being backed by a for-profit company is also great because projects like Django could use more marketing. Vercel figured this out a long time ago.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#50

Post by brokegrammer »

mychael wrote: post #47

Where is the unique value add? It's like the only differentiation is that they ran sed 's/django/plain/g' across the repo.

One immediate value add for me is built-in structured logging: https://plainframework.com/docs/plain/plain/logs/README.md

Setting this up in Django requires some gymnastics.

Post reply on HN