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Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

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Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

#1

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

We're a Django shop and we get tremendous value out of Django Admin. Most python-heads I know suggest Django Admin as a major reason to go with Django over flask or FastAPI. Beyond that, I don't think there's a clear equivalent in another language either. My question is this:

Why has Django Admin proliferated so strongly in the Django ecosystem while being unreplicated elsewhere?

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

#3

Post by withinboredom »

Mostly because it is dangerous (or was). For example, an integer that can only be 1, 2, or 3. In the admin (way back in the day, at least), someone could go into the admin and set it to 4. Which would then break everything in subtle ways.

Also, most applications have constraints like "X can only be 2 if and only if Y is equal to Z" ... there was no way to specify that constraint to the admin interface, so someone could set X to be 2, and it would break programmer assumptions who wrote code expecting Y to be equal to Z.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

#6

Post by mdisc »

I think it has to do with the times. Because sl admin came up in a pre DRF time when people use Django to serve templates, the work to build it into the framework came more naturally. With lots of more modern web app frameworks mainly focusing on just being APIs for single page applications, having html templates and stuff in the core project and having contributors build this stuff in doesn’t happen as naturally.

I totally agree though- huge selling point of Django!

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?

#8

Post by compumike »

Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin?

At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do that, and the Active Admin is nice to have but I wouldn't say "tremendous value".

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