Django just works out of the box. And if you hate JS, well… I am glad Django kept at it all these years despite all the JS frameworks gaining (and falling out of) popularity. So thank you to all those who contributed even when it wasn’t so sexy.
Happy 20th Birthday, Django
81–90 of 191 posts
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#82Out of curiosity, for people who have do projects in both Django and Ruby on Rails, which one would you prefer and why? I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
Depends on the project. I feel like Rails has better JS integration if your project really needs it. The out of the box JS experience with rails (import maps) is similar to django (static link from cdns), but the ability to set up esbuild from project generation makes it really easy
Literally just my opinion though, but I haven't been pleased with an extremely nice method to set up django with javascript that doesn't feel hacky for local dev and deployment
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#83In a very real sense, I have Django to thank for my entire career. As an undergraduate, my first academic job in a research lab had me building websites to promote the research in a lab. Django was brand new, and I was uninterested in petty concerns like stability and security, so I did everything in Django. Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I…
Same here. Built first web application in Django, have tried all the other frameworks over the years, and am now back to building another webapp in Django...
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#84Happy birthday! I've been using it for almost ten years. It was already mature at the time. Such a well-thought, perfectly documented framework.
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#85In a very real sense, I have Django to thank for my entire career. As an undergraduate, my first academic job in a research lab had me building websites to promote the research in a lab. Django was brand new, and I was uninterested in petty concerns like stability and security, so I did everything in Django. Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I…
> trying to build a complex front end using Django's ORM with physically separate per-user MySQL database servers. didnt they hear about sqlite, great for this setup
I don't think Django could have talked to sqlite over the network, or would have really solved any problems. When I say physically separate, I mean it in the pre-cloud sense: one front end server (Django) dynamically connecting to a database on a remote server (based on the user account), which had a database continuously logging streams of sensor data from local IoT devices.
What I did was change the architecture to support centralized aggregation in a large co-located Postgres server, implementing security to managed permissions for writers (sensor gateway) and readers (user accounts).
Eventually we had to write a pg backend similar in concept to timescaledb to handle the massive scale of sensor data we were ingesting...but that's another story entirely.
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that Django has/had any reputation for those things -- it's that Django had no reputation at all since it was a nascent project with no track record. That means it had no proof points for being stable or secure. At the time I adopted it (~Nov 2005), the public release of the Django project was only a few months old, and indeed breaking changes followed soon after (the so-called "magic removal branch"). As I…
how does one get to be a coder in a research project
As a student, ask around or check with your advisor. Most labs will have positions for students interested in coding "grunt work" because students are cheap.
As a professional, apply to Masters/PhD programs in your area of interest, or be young and an expert in an obscure technology the lab uses. Some labs will hire out contract work, but can't pay well (hence be young). Other labs have grant money to bring in non-phd researchers, but to get the job you'll both have to be an expert in a required technology, and be able to contribute actively to the research area of the lab. At Yale, I did this, as second author on a conference paper showing novel methods for applying machine learning in multi-agent, sensor -driven environments. It justified my paycheck as a researcher while I spent the other half of my time fixing broken code for other researchers and writing the first version of the software for our lab spinout.
Edit: I just want to clarify that my experiences with this don't go past 2010, so YMMV. Getting old is tough sometimes, it still feels like almost yesterday.
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#87Out of curiosity, for people who have do projects in both Django and Ruby on Rails, which one would you prefer and why? I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
I haven’t done a ton with Rails professionally - but in my mind, if I was doing customer facing CRUD I would reach for rails, I think the deployment ecosystem and development experience is a bit better.
Django, however, is wonderful for internal tooling, or anything where you need to plug in Python libraries. GIS is a clear win for Django, as well as custom BI work or data analytics
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#88Out of curiosity, for people who have do projects in both Django and Ruby on Rails, which one would you prefer and why? I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
I haven’t done a ton with Rails professionally - but in my mind, if I was doing customer facing CRUD I would reach for rails, I think the deployment ecosystem and development experience is a bit better. Django, however, is wonderful for internal tooling, or anything where you need to plug in Python libraries. GIS is a clear win for Django, as well as custom BI work or data analytics
Django, however, is wonderful for internal tooling, or anything where you need to plug in Python libraries. GIS is a clear win for Django, as well as custom BI work or data analytics
Can you share more here? Would you go the route of django templates for internal tooling?
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#89Happy to see Django still thriving, after flask it became my favorite web framework. Congrats to Django and he community!
Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Phoenix is very close to Django at fitting that bill.
Now Phoenix and Elixir are two technologies I love! But theyre admin offering is lacking. (Which is ok today in modern development and things like pgadmin)
Django Admin is a bit of a trap though ;) it's powerful enough that you can build an entire application with it, custom views and powerful filtering and ACLs and whatnot, it easily gets 80% of your job done with almost nothing but a declarative DSL.
But the remaining 20%? Now you've dug yourself a hole with no recourse but a complete rewrite. It's time/money you would've otherwise spent anyway, but that sunken cost fallacy hits hard.