Unicorn – A full-stack web framework for Django

Something that is nagging me though is the (still) rather incomplete take on client-side reactivity. Alpine.js is by-and-large addressing this in a pleasantly minimalistic way, but for this new take to become a defacto standard of lean and mean modern web development I feel there should be uniform semantics and integration that spans the different server-side stacks. This way code and knowledge would be reusable and not tied to a specific language/web platform.

I can say that nodejs and TypeScript and pure SQL is so simple and straightforward that I seem to need almost nothing in terms of "framework". I just write endpoints with a query behind them.

On reflection I spent alot of development time hacking around in Django models/forms and the ORM and really almost none of that is needed if you just write straight SQL with Postgres. It's just unnecessary complexity - once you cut all that guff out then things start to become REALLY simple. Request/auth/query/response.

I put auth into a separate web application which gets called by Caddy (or you coudl use Nginx) as an auth subrequest. This makes auth extremely easy, and gives a very powerful decoupling and separation of concerns.

For many years I have thought, finally, that's the last time I need to write a user signup/forgot password/signin flow, but every project still seems to need it written, so I do that myself.

This approach of super simple, just talking to Postgres also would work well with Python but I have come to really like TypeScript more than Python. The latest Python projects I wrote were pretty much Starlette with asynpg talking to Postgres and no ORM or other fluff - that's a pretty nice combination, and asyncpg is the fastest Postgres driver for Python by a country mile which is also nice.

If I wanted RBAC then I would intercept all my SQL queries and wrap them in Postgres RBAC environment variables that implement the Postgres constraints. I've done this before with Django, it worked pretty well, but I think it would be nicer and cleaner in a system without ORM or database abstraction of any form.

The fact that the Django project and you have different preferences and consider different things essential is not a failure on their end. The fact that this "pisses you off" seems to indicate that you could channel your passion into more productive paths.

My opinion: They should go the Phoenix Live View-route: adding a small websocket js layer, that permits reactivity while deferring as much logic to the backend as possible.