Django 5.0

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2023/dec/04/django-50-released/

by sarahboyce • 3 years ago

554 233 3 years ago

djangoproject.com

sarahboyce2• 3 years ago

Release notes: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/releases/5.0/

Related Community Resources

* New goodies in Django 5.0 [blog]: https://fly.io/django-beats/new-goodies-in-django-50/

* What's new in Django 5.0 [video]: https://youtu.be/lPl5Q5gv9G8?feature=shared

* Database generated columns⁽¹⁾: Django & SQLite [blog]: https://www.paulox.net/2023/11/07/database-generated-columns...

* Database generated columns⁽²⁾: Django & PostgreSQL [blog]: https://www.paulox.net/2023/11/24/database-generated-columns...

* Building a Bootstrap styled form in vanilla Django [blog]: https://smithdc.uk/blog/2023/bootstrap_form_in_vanilla_djang...

h4kor4• 3 years ago

Sadly I don't use Django anymore at work but it still has a special place in my heart. The ORM model is the best I've ever worked with and any other always feels clunky with sharp edges to cut you when you hold it wrong.

In recent years Django had multiple major releases, I still remember it as being in 1.x forever. Does somebody know what changed within the Django Community that they break backward compatibility more often?

jedi_stannis• 3 years ago

They switched their versioning scheme after the 1.x.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/release-proc...

freedomben• 3 years ago

Have you worked with ActiveRecord or Ecto? Just wondering for framing your comment

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

Not who you’re asking, but I’ve used all 3. I think in terms of query interface you can’t go wrong with any of them. In fact, I like Ecto the most because of its separation between the concept of a “Query” (super flexible and composable) vs. a “Repo” (the module where you call an actual database operation). This helps you avoid hitting the database until you’re sure you want to.

Where Django’s ORM shines is in the modeling stage: classes in models.py are your single source of truth, relationships only need to be defined once, no separate “schema” file, and most of the time migrations can be generated automatically. It’s truly top-notch.

h4kor4• 3 years ago

I briefly used Ecto when trying out Phoenix framework but have not worked enough with it to form an opinion.

DarkNova64• 3 years ago

The ORM model is the best I've ever worked with and any other always feels clunky with sharp edges to cut you when you hold it wrong.

Idk. I have to grant that Django ORM likes to make your life easy, but lazy loading on property calls is a dark pit full of shap punji sticks. Just overlook one instance where this is happening in a loop and say goodbye to performance and hello to timeouts left and right...

eYrKEC2• 3 years ago

ORM's always abstract away details, but you monitor for slow queries and slow endpoints and then just fix the issues when they crop up.

Alex39172• 3 years ago

Just overlook one instance where this is happening in a loop and say goodbye to performance and hello to timeouts left and right...

FWIW they do give you assertNumQueries in the testing tools, which makes it relatively easy to catch this as long as you have tests.

belorn• 3 years ago

There does seem to be a natural conflict between large data with hierarchical structure and the generally flat lists and dictionaries of Python, that quickly leads to poor performance. It usually only takes a few foreign keys to create an exponential number of queries.

But I have no idea if there are database interfaces that make this problem simplistic. In my experience with Django, anything but the most simplistic page will be so noticeable slow that one has to go through the queries and use things like select related. Occasionally it is also better to just grab everything into memory and do operations in Python, rather than force the data manipulation to be done as a single database query.

It is a good tool for its purpose, but it is no replacement for SQL knowledge when working with complex relational databases.

har7773• 3 years ago

Simple middleware can warn you about lazy loading/N+1 queries. Most of the time people just forget it happens.

Try using: https://github.com/har777/pellet

Disclaimer: I built it :p

You can easily see N+1 queries on the console itself or write a callback function to track such issues on your monitoring stack of choice on production.

fbdab1035• 3 years ago

Non-performant code is going to eventually slip into any codebase. The trick is to monitor for when performance falls to an unacceptable level. Not toss all ORMs because some minority of generated queries are problematic.

If maximum performance, 100% of the time was the end-goal, I would not be writing Python.

h4kor4• 3 years ago

I'd rather have a slow page because of lazy loading, than a wrong page because the related objects are not loaded (i.e. typeorm)

greenie_beans2• 3 years ago

lol been refactoring something like this

robertlagrant10• 3 years ago

I sort of said this elsewhere. Others are saying "that's just what happens" and "well, Python?" but it doesn't just happen, and slow database queries are nothing to do with the application language. The problem is Django ORM, like Ruby on Rails, uses the Active Record pattern. Alternate ORMs, such as SQLAlchemy or Hibernate, uses Data Mapper pattern, which avoids the pitfalls of Active Record.

gen220• 3 years ago

I think Django's ORM is a product of its time, when limitations about the expressibility of the "active record" concept were not fully understood.

I like to describe it as Django's ORM will satisfy 80% of your needs immediately, 90% if you invest and sweat, 95% if you're quite knowledgeable in the underlying SQL. But there are still some rather common query shapes that are inexpressible or terribly awkward with Django's ORM.

SQLAlchemy on the other hand never tries to hide its complexity (although to be fair they've become much better at communicating it in 2.0). On Day 1 you'll know maybe 20% of what you need to. You might not even have a working application until the end of week 1. But at the end of, idk, month 6? You're a wizard.

The long-term value ceiling of SQLAlchemy/Alembic is higher than Django's, but Django compensates for it with their comparatively richer plugin ecosystem, so it's not so easy to compare the two.

sarahboyce2• 3 years ago

The release process is time-based as to roughly every 8 months[1] with X.0, X.1, and X.2 (LTS). This is mostly to communicate which release has long term support.

The deprecation policy[2] is taken very seriously and Django doesn't opt to break things if it can.

Recently there was a very interesting discussion[3] between the Fellows as to whether the version numbering is confusing as this doesn't follow the same pattern as other libraries.

1: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/release-proc...

2: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/release-proc...

3: https://fosstodon.org/@carlton/111300877531721385

adastra22• 3 years ago

Similar to bitcoin, they changed to a time-based versioning scheme. Major releases don't indicated that they DID break compatibility, but that they MIGHT HAVE, and more importantly prior versions are no longer supported. Effectively the same as a LTS release.

pmontra2• 3 years ago

The ORM is OK as long as you refrain from using any inheritance. If you do, the database becomes a mess quickly and only that very Django app will be able to read and write to it (including manage.py shell). Anything else, other apps in any language or a SQL client, will be lost in a sea of tables and joins.

I've got a customer with two Django apps. One was developed enthusiastically in the object orientation way. The database is a nightmare. The other one was developed thinking table by table and creating models that mimic the tables we want to have. That's a database we can also deal with from other apps and tools.

dd82• 3 years ago

tbh, any OOP paradigms used with db tables will end up in a clusterf*ck.

NoGravitas• 3 years ago

I've found inheritance to be a problem with pretty much any ORM I've used extensively (Django, Hibernate, NHibernate, Entity Framework). It helps to design your OOP model with that in mind; having no more than one level of inheritance, and using inheritance only to supplement a set of common records seem to be good enough rules of thumb.

alberth• 3 years ago

What's the preferred Python Web Framework these days?

I've read a lot of love for Litestar (formerly Starlite), since it seems people prefer it over FastAPI, Flask, etc.

https://litestar.dev

Or is the preferred web framework still Django?

Maxion2• 3 years ago

I guess it depends entirely on what it is that you are building - there's no one-size-fits-all but for Python for me that is still Django.

whitej125• 3 years ago

Depends what you're solving for. Building a website that requires user authentication and basic relational DB... I default to Django. But if I'm building small internal services then I go FastAPI or Flask. Django's ORM is still dreamy.

I used to like DRF (Django Rest Framework) and Django + DRF was a powerful combo to drive single-page-application sites. But DRF can get a little painful if you're not using some of the out-of-the-box classes. Painful as in... lots of code to right and very hard for someone to maintain without knowledge of how DRF magic is made under the hood.

danpalmer3• 3 years ago

I've always felt, and this hasn't changed recently, that if you're going to need more than, say, 3 of the cross cutting concerns that Django provides for, then it'll be much more maintainable in the long run to just use Django rather than effectively building a custom solution out of parts. The flip side: if you're building a small internal API that only needs a couple of these, Django might be overkill.

What do I mean by "cross cutting concerns"? I'm thinking about ORM/models, migrations, admin UI, caching, sessions, misc security middleware, user accounts, validation/forms, templating, RSS feeds, logging, testing infrastructure, etc. Django's pieces all fit together well, and any time I've done this with Flask/etc I've found myself spending so much time solving issues gluing these bits together and working around impedance mismatches between libraries.

We had a large Django site at my last place and would just suggest new starters worked through the Django tutorial, because our site basically still worked like that.

BasilPH3• 3 years ago

I agree. I would even go so far as to say that if you need an ORM, go with Django. I've wasted too much time adding SQLAlchemy to Flask to get something that is still worse than the Django ORM.

stavros• 3 years ago

I half-agree with you, I've found that there are two options when choosing a framework:

1. You're making something with 100 lines, which you're absolutely sure will stay 100 lines. Go with Flask.

2. Otherwise, Django.

Django is great at getting out of your way when you don't need its functionality, so you can just ignore most of it if you don't need it.

filterfiber2• 3 years ago

I know it's not "shiny and new" but Django is still serving us very well were I work.

The only two things it lacks great support of is typing and async. However the async is actively being worked on and does work (with some quirks), and python's type support has only gotten half-mature just recently (coming from typescript at least).

I would personally be hesitant to try something new just because django is so battle-tested at this stage, unless you just absolutely require better async support.

aerhardt• 3 years ago

However the async is actively being worked on and does work (with some quirks)

I recently tried to implement it in a project using the new ORM a-methods (which AFAIK are not even async under the hood) and it resulted in an explosion of complexity bubbling up in many places in the codebase. I reverted everything to sync and re-implemented the hot functions with multi-threading... I think I'll keep to this approach until I see some good guides, codebase examples, and overall feature maturity.

PurpleRamen• 3 years ago

Jetbrains Python Survey from 2022[1] has Flask, Django, Fastapi dominating the web-frameworks. Not sure how reliable this is, but I also barely see any other frameworks mentioned. So they either are in a totally different bubble, or just not popular (yet).

[1] https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2022/#Fram...

sgt2• 3 years ago

Still Django unless you're only building a simple API.

robertlagrant10• 3 years ago

Why not a complex API?

davepeck• 3 years ago

I choose between Django and Litestar these days.

I wish I had a hard and fast rule for the choice, but it's something like:

- Litestar if I know with certainty (a) the thing I'm building is and always will be a tiny service and (b) I probably won't have to evolve the backing data schema much. Wrap an ML model? Litestar. Have a small database I want to expose via API, read-mostly? Litestar.

- Django if I know (a) I'm going to be building on this over a longer timeframe, (b) I have complex user/group auth needs, (c) my data schema will likely go through substantial evolution, or (d) I will need an admin UI in the early goings, either for the managing team or for customer support.

I have plenty of SQLAlchemy+Alembic+Litestar backends but I vastly prefer the creature comforts of Django's ORM + migrations; it hits that 80% sweet spot so very well. SQLalchemy is both raw power and, often, far too much friction.

I used to choose between Django and Flask, but Litestar -- while still young -- seems to capture most of the key things I liked about core Flask but in a more modern package. (Maybe Quart, aka async Flask, will ultimately win the day; not sure.)

It's not targeted at the use case, but I wonder if Datasette will replace my need for the Django admin UI at least in some limited set of cases.

These days, most of my front-ends are React+Typescript+Vite.

(FWIW I personally avoid FastAPI entirely. I appreciate the impact it had getting the python community to think about (a) async (b) proper use of type hints in the web context and (c) the need for OpenAPI support, etc. but there are a lot of footguns and so many issues still opened that its (amazing, lovely) single maintainer probably won't get to. SQLModel -- aka the merging of Pydantic + SQLAlchemy ORM models -- is an even bigger trap, IMO.)

the__alchemist2• 3 years ago

Django; none of the new-hotness one compares. This is my no-bullshit answer that comparative articles and these frameworks' home pages dodge.

rossdavidh• 3 years ago

If you are doing something that is basic CRUD (which, to be honest, is most of the business world, although it's not very sexy), then Django is the best. If you want to do something that doesn't fit very well into that idea, then Flask is good for "just give me a web wrapper and get out of my way".

mands• 3 years ago

Have been a big Django user over the past 10 years at my startups, but we decided to do all new projects in Litestar going forwards - typing, async, and a better REST API story made it the preferred choice for us.

saasjosh2• 3 years ago

Another boring release without much innovation. I wonder what's stopping Django from releasing more useful features like other frameworks are doing. Maybe the team is stuck in the past.

They've been trying to improve forms for a long time but it still sucks. I think they should just remove it at this point and let external packages solve the problem.

Maxion2• 3 years ago

Not much no, but both the GeneratedField and db_default would be useful in almost all projects I've ever implemented in Django.

saasjosh2• 3 years ago

Good for you but they're niche features that most developers will never use. I certainly won't.

That's why I switched to NextJS anyway. Django's implementing features voted by the board and companies who fund the project the most. They don't care about end users anymore.

synergy20• 3 years ago

can you list the features you mentioned that is lacking in django?

collyw5• 3 years ago

Another boring release without much innovation

That's a good thing. A couple of articles related to the topic.

https://boringtechnology.club/

https://www.david-dahan.com/blog/10-reasons-mvc-frameworks-a...

brycewray• 3 years ago

Assuming they used Django to publish this, it’s a bit sad that there’s no `generator` tag to give their own CMS a little love. :-/

danpalmer3• 3 years ago

Django isn't really a CMS. People sometimes group it in with other CMSs because it's good for rapid development of CRUD web applications, but I think most people think about a much higher level tool when they think of a CMS. It's also somewhat limiting – Django is good for building big web applications (see: Instagram, Octopus Energy) not just traditional content management based applications.

robertlagrant10• 3 years ago

People sometimes group it in with other CMSs because it's good for rapid development of CRUD web applications

No, it's because there's a CMS called Django CMS.

jmduke3• 3 years ago

My app is a Django backend and a Vue frontend. There are large swathes of Django that I ignore, but to me the core of Django — its ORM, routing and middleware system, and admin interface — are worth their weight in gold. The migration from DRF to Django-Ninja (which is, roughly, FastAPI + Django) has also been a great improvement in terms of productivity and performance.

Not a lot of whizbang features in 5.0, but GeneratedField looks like a very nice addition, and reason enough to migrate.

malux85• 3 years ago

Mine too - Vue and django, and the django rest framework, it’s super productive - no writing all the crud views manually for the hundreds of models I have, the django admin interface is very helpful like you say, and backend is running (a very highly customized) django celery mix,

Django + REST framework takes a little more to learn than something like FastAPI, but once you understand how all the middleware, permission and query classes work, you can be hyper productive

sprainedankles• 3 years ago

Any resources/examples you'd recommend for a Vue frontend w/django? I've been pretty firmly in backend land for a while and would to experiment with the other half of the puzzle!

jmduke3• 3 years ago

I'll preface all of this with a couple esoteric design goals that I had in mind:

1. I actually _want_ an SPA. You might not need an SPA, if you don't need one then Vue/React/etc are overkill, etc.

2. I want to power as much of the SPA as I can using the same REST API as my core product, both for dogfooding reasons and for consolidation. Many people might argue that this is a bad idea.

---

With that in mind, some specific packages that I highly recommend:

1. Django-vite (https://github.com/MrBin99/django-vite). This makes it very easy to serve an SPA from the actual django response/request model

2. Some sort of way to get type information (if you're using TypeScript) into the frontend. I use a frankensteined system of the OpenAPI spec that django-ninja generates + openapi-typescript (https://github.com/drwpow/openapi-typescript). This means when I add, say, a new field to a response in Django, I immediately get typechecking for it in Vue — which has been _tremendously_ useful.

3. Django-typescript-routes (a package I extracted and open-sourced!: https://github.com/buttondown-email/django-typescript-routes) which gives your front-end routing information based on the Django router.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

If you really need VueJs in the frontend, consider, that you can simple serve the VueJs on any page where it is actually needed. VueJs does not necessarily mean you must create a SPA. VueJs can be delivered like any other script and this is often the easiest way without having to commit to build a full blown SPA.

jim180• 3 years ago

Coming from iOS/macOS background, I've kinda enjoyed Django with its all time classics (forms, templates, etc.) + HTMX.

Admin interface was extremely helpful, when we are trying to validate business idea.

amir_karbasi• 3 years ago

How was the effort to migrate from DRF to Django-Ninja? I saw Django-Ninja mentioned in another post and am thinking of switching one of my projects over from DRF. After skimming their documentation, it looks very pleasant and simple and perfect for my use case.

jmduke3• 3 years ago

Going from 0 → 1 migrated route was "medium difficulty", I'd say — there was a non-trivial amount of scaffolding I had to build out around auth, error codes, and so on, and django-ninja's docs are still a little lackluster when it comes to edge cases.

Once I had that one migrated route, though, the rest were very simple. (And I am very happy with the migration overall!)

collyw5• 3 years ago

Agreed, the admin makes development so much easier, being able to easily enter and view your data.

cdcarter2• 3 years ago

GeneratedField looks interesting, but I'm not _really_ sure what gains I get over just calling annotate() on my queryset with some computed fields. At least on the backends where the computed GeneratedField isn't stored.

radus2• 3 years ago

It's easier to re-use if you need the same generated field in multiple places.

OJFord• 3 years ago

It's a generated column in the database, vs. annotate is just a python alias for something you're selecting in the query.

tmnvix• 3 years ago

Actually having the derived data in the database would be helpful for simplifying something like a website search implementation. I know I could have used it last month!

apstats• 3 years ago

Django seems great but also incredibly complex.

I am never able to find any good example projects that use it with react and aren't just a toy which is bit of a bummer, because I think that would be a great stack.

bastawhiz2• 3 years ago

Django makes it dead easy to take a URL route and return HTML. Obviously there's some fussing to add a script tag that points at your JavaScript file, but what exactly are you looking for beyond that? I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for beyond that (as someone who ~only writes Django+React); that's kind of it. There's no big magic, it responds to http requests with data.

Izkata2• 3 years ago

For a full-on SPA (which I'm assuming is what they mean by "and aren't just a toy"), you'd also need at least frontend routing and an example how to make that play nice with Django URL routes, probably a data store (which at this point I think is just going to be redux), and most of the Django views would return JSON instead of HTML.

Vinnl• 3 years ago

In case you're interested, Firefox Relay uses that stack and is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/

vangale• 3 years ago

Posthog uses react for front-end and django for back-end. https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/project-structure

scrollaway7• 3 years ago

A huge part of the work I did the past year (and still do sometimes, email in my profile) was helping people transition from a full legacy django app to a lightweight django backend with rest api and a react frontend.

Django Ninja makes it especially pleasant.

I think django should really embrace this in the future. Make it easier to drop the superfluous parts; forms, templates …

I don’t know what that will look like but I don’t see a way back.

number6• 3 years ago

We are using Django "Legacy" Apps.I am puzzled by the "new" Single Page Applications (SPAs). They require extensive routing, authentication, and GraphQL integration, all of which are already handled by Django's ORM and views.Additionally, Django efficiently manages forms. The primary advantage I see in SPAs is enhanced reactivity, which certainly improves user experience. However, HTMX seems sufficient in this aspect.What would be your sales pitch to someone like me?

nprateem2• 3 years ago

Mobile

collyw5• 3 years ago

Twice as much code for the same functionality. They are better if you have a heavily interactive frontend. But th majority of apps don't need that. Github uses a traditional server side renderrd app, if I am not mistaken, and no on has complained about that.

scrollaway7• 3 years ago

Broadly, if you're happy with Django and haven't felt the need to transition to SPA, power to you. This is the case in some industries. It's generally not the case in b2c, though, and if you haven't felt the pain yet then you likely aren't in touch enough with your customers (or you haven't connected the dots).

I don't need to sell you on the concept though I will address your comment in depth.

In general, React (especially with typescript) provides a far better developer experience than Django+Templates. The latter is extremely brittle, difficult to test, difficult to refactor, difficult to organize. The former is robust, typed, testable, easily refactored. It's simply quicker to work with React. And this has quadratic effects on how quickly work gets done: The whole stack is easier to work with, which has gains on every level such as learning pace, testing, including third party libraries, deploying, finding and fixing bugs, ...

The advantages of an SPA are an extension of this. You get to move more logic in this frontend layer. Routing at the frontend layer is mainly a performance thing: You don't get to re-download and re-render your entire page when going from, say, viewing "Produc 1" to viewing "Product 2". The whole structure is the same but the content changes = you should only get to update the content, right? If you handle routing at the frontend level, this is something you can achieve.

But routing in frontend also enables some new things you just cannot easily do without it. For example now it's trendy to have apps that open content (such as a post) which opens in a preview window/drawer (saving your current state), but if you reload the page or share the url, it loads in its own individual view. Why is it trending now? Because SPAs have enabled that behaviour.

GraphQL integration is definitely not something that is required, and in fact in ~30 client projects of this type, I've only ever done it twice, for two people it was actually relevant for.

But: You generally want an API anyway. Writing your frontend<>backend communication as an API means you can offer it to your customers as well. It's a good pattern to follow, IMO. And if you're going to have that API, then separating the frontend into an SPA is much easier, because you can use that API to drive all the communication. This makes you a user of it (dogfooding).

As for forms -- Almost all form validation should happen both in the frontend AND in the backend, this is a textbook case of something which should be (mostly) duplicated. The backend MUST validate the input at some layer, lest you end up with security issues. But the frontend SHOULD also validate it, because it's a terrible experience to fill in 15 fields, submit, then see a "please correct the errors below" message with 3 of your fields red, your chosen password gone, the captcha to re-do, and that's if you ever manage to get good errors out of the backend because sometimes it just says "This value is invalid" and you have to manually figure out what's happening there (which for normal people means you'll sometimes hear "your X form didn't work" with zero additional feedback).

lagt_t• 3 years ago

No thanks, I prefer to drop React and use django + htmx for ajax.

scrollaway7• 3 years ago

Hey, if you're happy writing html using not-quite-jinja templates that are completely impossible to test, auto-format, or even sometimes syntax highlight...

what can I say, power to you. You go, buddy.

kbrannigan3• 3 years ago

What do people like torturing themselves by duplicating code. Wouldn't it be easier to just use node all the way.

Writing hundreds of lines of JS to display a Table list, instead of HTML sprinkled with some JS

scrollaway7• 3 years ago

A whole stack rewrite is not always (in fact very rarely) a good idea. The backend often drives a lot of logic; in a big rewrite, the less you rewrite the more likely you are to be successful.

Too many big refactors fail because they aren’t done in value-adding steps.

Also your second paragraph isn’t in line with your first … in react you don’t write “hundreds of lines of js” for a table. You write the html as js (jsx), and sprinkle the dynamic parts on top. It’s equivalent…

globular-toast4• 3 years ago

I've gone the opposite way. Started converting views to rest framework viewsets and building React components on the front end. It just created more problems. Now the React stuff is considered legacy and we're using HTMX and the bare minimum of vanilla JS when necessary.

scrollaway7• 3 years ago

REST Framework is frankly... flawed. Full of good ideas, but in practice, it leads to development hell unless you're very rigorous with it.

FastAPI is the gold standard, which in the Django works means Django-Ninja.

If you've been building individual React components and integrating them without going the SPA route, then while there are some upsides to that, you are doing a lot of the effort but not getting most of the benefits.

If you don't need an SPA, then you don't need an SPA. Nobody should be getting this development pattern shoved down their throats. But from what you describe, it sounds to me like you went with a bad approach altogether, so no kidding it created more problems.

(Not to make it sound like a "no true scotsman" with the whole "bad approach" thing, but this is why it's important to get people who really know their shit in driving refactors like these, and can make a strong plan ahead of time, detailing what value is brought at each and every step)

robertlagrant10• 3 years ago

Now the React stuff is considered legacy

There's no point announcing things are now "legacy". Legacy is what Microsoft invented to call products they just made a competitor for, and the psychology seems the same. If it doesn't fit your needs, great. But React is useful for lots of needs.

BasilPH3• 3 years ago

I'm excited to try the field group templates, I expect it to make handling forms styled with Tailwind much easier.

stosssik• 3 years ago

can you list the features that are lacking in django?

pphysch2• 3 years ago

I would point to two of the most popular plugins, Django Rest Framework (DRF) and Celery (a background task system that requires rabbitmq|kafka|redis|etc).

Both add highly sought-after features, but I believe these implementations are quite poor, complicated. Django could implement MVPs in core/contrib and vastly simplify future projects for users.

A builtin OIDC client abstraction would go a long way as well.

bdzr2• 3 years ago

The worst thing about DRF is the dogmatic adherence to inexplicable class hierarchies, something that is modeled after Django class based views. I think Django would fumble a DRF implementation.

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

Django made me fall in love with programming 13 years ago, and since then it has always had a special place in my heart.

I’m revisiting a business idea I was working on for a couple years, before I sought and found employment in the industry (where I used Java for a couple years, then Elixir for a couple more). My project was built with Django and Django REST Framework, and Ember on the client-side. 6 years later, the Django side needed minimal changes and is up and running (I jumped all the way from 1.11 to 5.0 beta).

Meanwhile, the Ember part is “lost in time… like tears in rain”. I tried everything, downloading older versions of Node and even the now-deprecated Bower. I don’t fault Ember (which is actually the most stable of the major JS client frameworks). But the JS (especially Node) ecosystem is beyond redemption in my eyes.

For my rewrite of the client, I’m going to skip the drama and just use htmx. Render Django templates server-side, include a single JS script, thrown in some HTML attributes, distinguish between full page requests vs. requests for a partial with updated data, and call it a day. No TypeScript, no Webpack, none of that nonsense. If I need special interactivity I can throw in some hyperscript.

At work I’ve used Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView and it’s revolutionary, truly awesome tech. But to get to market I would rather not have to customize an auth system and build a decent admin interface myself (I tried Ash; its auth and admin are not mature enough to be compared to what “just works” with Django). Yeah, it won’t be as scalable as a Phoenix app, but to me, Django seems like the most clean and rapid way to get to a point where you’ll actually need scalability.

cjauvin• 3 years ago

I absolutely agree. Recently I had to work on a complex client app, and I could simply not believe the amount of trouble you have to go through when you want to increment the version number of things like React, MUI, webpack, TS by.. one!

gedy• 3 years ago

want to increment the version number of things like React, MUI, webpack, TS by.. one!

To be fair, in semver that means a breaking change of some sort.

snoopsnopp• 3 years ago

Totally agree, but is Ember truly the most stable? This is pretty much my only criteria for JS at this point.

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

If you want a heavyweight JS framework, Ember is the most stable and best supported. I enjoyed Ember when I used it in the 2015-2017 time frame.

But I’m abandoning the heavy JS paradigm in favor of htmx. Aside from the fact that I don’t want to duplicate routing and data validation across client and server, htmx is intentionally a single JS file with no build step, so in theory it should run fine as long as browsers maintain backward compatibility.

bluecheese452• 3 years ago

Fwiw trying to get an old ember app running was an absolute nightmare. On top of that it is way too heavy for my liking. Pretty much polar opposite of jquery.

mattwad• 3 years ago

As a full-time Node.js dev, I agree with your decision! Too much time is wasted on compatibility problems. I'd almost say it was easier when we just had browsers to deal with. At least you could just drop in jQuery and call it a day.

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

Yes, jQuery is often derided as outdated, but it worked quite well for a very long time, with minimal hassle for developers. In fact, I was working full-time on static Elixir/Phoenix pages with jQuery sprinkled on top as late as 2022… it felt a bit clunky but it worked as advertised and wasn’t frustrating in any significant way.

dinkleberg2• 3 years ago

I'm with you on this, Django + HTMX + Vanilla JS (where needed) just works which is a beautiful thing.

Is building out the UI clunkier with Django templates than with JSX? Absolutely.

But not having to worry about both server and client side state is such a time saver and you know it is going to continue to work.

For the past few years I've been using Go (using Gin) in place of Django, and it works nicely and is quite a bit faster. However, recently I've been toying around with Django again, thinking about making it my default for new projects because it really does take care of so much that you'd otherwise have to deal with yourself.

Klonoar3• 3 years ago

An approach I've done in the past for projects that are publicly API-based:

Django handles the database migrations and user accounts/models/etc - and you get the useful admin to boot, which is just incredible if you ever need to open up the data layer to someone else.

Then just write the API interface in Go/Rust/your language of choice. It decouples the DB modeling from the API layer, but in practice... I've just not run into significant issues with it. I'm sure it could be an issue though, so YMMV.

rigoleto• 3 years ago

I’m going to skip the drama and just use htmx for the client-side. Render Django templates server-side, include a single JS script, thrown in some HTML attributes, distinguish between full page requests vs. requests for a partial with updated data, and call it a day.

More of a side comment, but I'm skeptical of the way HTMX encourages partial renders like this. It feels like a premature optimization that adds more complexity on the back end. `hx-select` takes care of it, but to me it feels like it should be the default (it's what Unpoly does).

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

There is a header that htmx injects to indicate you want a partial render, and it’s really not that hard to add an if on the server-side to check for it. A larger codebase would probably break templates up anyway for maintainability, so it’s just a tiny amount of extra work if you want to reduce the amount of HTML being sent over the wire and swapped in.

megaman8213• 3 years ago

There is a package, https://github.com/carltongibson/django-template-partials, that is basically like server-side hx-select, when there is some performance concern. Overall, I agree with you though, hx-select is going to be fine most the time.

winrid2• 3 years ago

Django and django-unicorn is really nice. It feels like meteorjs but for Django, extremely productive. I've been working with the creator closely and he's awesome.

mattgreenrocks• 3 years ago

django-unicorn is really impressive! So glad to see people pushing back on all the gunk inherent in webdev still.

rollcat3• 3 years ago

6 years later, the Django side needed minimal changes and is up and running (I jumped all the way from 1.11 to 5.0 beta).

I've been using Django since before 1.0, and the upgrade story has been nothing short of fantastic for something that's been around this long. But still, YMMV!

Depending on how ancient a project you run into, it definitely can be a major pain, even with the original authors' best intentions. For example, Django didn't have its own DB migration system until 1.7 (relying on third party solutions); this means you also have to adjust the deployment procedure, which means recreating an ancient setup (ideally in an easily repeatable fashion, because you're going to be trying that migration at least a dozen times).

The builtin admin system is also a pretty decent CMS on its own, but falls short as you run into slightly more complex use cases (such as basically anything that requires even a single line of JS). The docs will encourage you to copy and override the builtin templates; this often becomes a pain point during upgrades. It's wise to get off the builtin admin system as your project grows.

Alex39172• 3 years ago

FWIW I've also had the same experience; the last version of Django where upgrading took a non-trivial amount of time was 1.8, because it changed how isolation is enforced within test cases. Since then it's rarely taken more than an hour or two, regardless of how big the codebase is.

rglullis2• 3 years ago

The builtin admin system is also a pretty decent CMS on its own (...) It's wise to get off the builtin admin system as your project grows.

And go to another superbly robust and easy to use actual CMS: wagtail.

qup• 3 years ago

<3 South

greenie_beans2• 3 years ago

i've been using django + htmx and vanilla js where needed. it's great!

my biggest beef with it is code organization, which will only get better with more experience. and it's a side project so it doesn't matter. i do worry about using it on a team because i could this stack getting messy if not done the right way.

Keats2• 3 years ago

I haven't used Elixir yet and mostly using flask in Python for work but I started with Django (and still think it's better than flask for most apps). If stuff like https://github.com/aesmail/kaffy (first thing I've found on google, never heard of it before) is on par with the Django admin, would you still use Django or Elixir and never look back?

ralmidani7• 3 years ago

I don’t know if I would “never look back” to Django (I’m a sentimental person). But admin is one aspect, the other big one is auth. I also like DTL better than EEx/HEEx. And all the pieces of Django just fit together really nicely; where Ecto happens to be the preferred way to interact with a database from Elixir, and Phoenix happens to be the preferred way to build Web apps using Elixir, (maybe with Ash layered on top), they weren’t designed by the same people, so you have packages like ecto_phoenix, ash_phoenix, etc. to make them all play together in an elegant way.

I will admit, Elixir and Phoenix have better real-time and scalability stories.

If I had a choice I would probably prefer Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView when joining an org to work on an established codebase that may have actual scalability needs and concerns. But I would probably prefer Django when starting from scratch.

SadWebDeveloper• 3 years ago

IMHO... Django hold a high standard in terms for projects running beyond the infamous 5+ years of support... still have some projects that with minimal changes (mostly configs and dependencies that got redundant/integrated into django -like choices-) are working with the latest version, surely 5.0 will not be that drastic if you are already doing software "the django way".

Things that are Django achilles heel are not developing software "the django way", mostly anything that needs some client-side to work is a PITA, requires lots of rewriting and custom templates that at some point you gotta start looking django as a backend more like the full stack framework that was meant to be. Also anything related onto getting things to production is another PITA that hasn't been solved or touched in years, dx deployment is one of those things almost any JS Framework out there is doing things better than what django supports.

dexwiz• 3 years ago

Isn't Developer DX mostly a way to get developers locked into your platform? I have avoided Next.js for this reason, it seems like just a way to funnel developers towards Vercel. DX is largely a service specific problem since its coupled to the service you are deploying to.

yunohn• 3 years ago

Django is free, in all definitions and purposes of the word. No agenda, no VC funding, no BS.

yuppiepuppie4• 3 years ago

3 years ago I moved to fast growing startup that was founded with fast api slap-dashed together. I jammed Django down their throats and I can safely say it was the best decision we made as an Org. The teams using Django are far far more productive than the others.

When a product I think is going to need users and roles and permissions, I grab Django off the shelf and never look back.

Thank you mister reinhardt

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

Yeah this is definitely Django's strength - it has a lot of the stuff you're probably going to need already implemented. Massive time saver when you're setting things up.

Python definitely holds it back though. Does it have type hints yet?

yuppiepuppie4• 3 years ago

Why do you say python holds it back?

alfor• 3 years ago

I am trying to show the value of it in my company: fastapi + vue.js and severy short staffed.

There are so much structural mistakes in our codebase, they use async python but messed it up in all the important places yet believe that Django is slow or innadequate.

They belive that Django is too "old school" and that if you want good results you need vue.js an api and all that.

Truth is, no one has the time and experience to make something good with that.

Developpement is very slow and code is buggy management is unsatisfied with the results yet they refuse to try it out.

It seem their ideas are made up and won't change.

yuppiepuppie4• 3 years ago

Fwiw, it was an investment while short staffed that paid dividends later on.

It sounds like in your case, like mine, it’s a cultural issue that you are trying to solve, not a technical one. A cultural issue of wanting to deploy and ship a product fast and not worry about the stuff that’s already been solved.

You can always do a POC and show the value of it to the stakeholders. What I did was picked a product that would greatly benefit from it and went through the entire migration process with product and got their buy in.

ds3w2• 3 years ago

django is good

just one thing

fix .select_related('child__attribute') / .values('child__attribute')

currently it removes from result set rows where 'attribute' is NULL, unlike what typical LEFT JOINs imply

tomwojcik• 3 years ago

I never run into this issue but isn't it that Django uses inner join for select related, so it does what it's supposed to do?

You can always prefetch related, or even use outer=True. This will return the results you expect.

nickjj2• 3 years ago

Congrats on the release to the Django community!

If anyone is curious, I updated my Django / Docker starter app to use Django 5.0 at: https://github.com/nickjj/docker-django-example

It pulls together gunicorn, Celery, Redis, Postgres, esbuild and Tailwind with Docker Compose. It's set up to run in both development and production.

hipjiveguy2• 3 years ago

nice... thanks!

hipjiveguy2• 3 years ago

where do you tend to run stuff in production? and if you were a startup - any preferences?

nickjj2• 3 years ago

It depends.

I personally use DigitalOcean but now that Hetzner is starting to get US data centers that is looking like a good option too.

With no other context, if I were creating a startup today I'd likely go with DigitalOcean.

AWS is also another option, especially if you think you'll be using some of their services.

But for a typical web app + SQL database + cache + object storage set up DO works nicely, although I would still use S3 for object storage even though DO has it, I find S3 to be more dependable.

93po• 3 years ago

If someone were to look for a web developer job these days, is Django the framework to focus on if you want a project that has a decent quality of life and is easy to get a job doing? I assume it's between that and Rails.

Alternatively, if I already have a ton of web framework experience and desperately want to move on to something different, what are some natural areas to extend into to stop working for agencies making crappy websites for small businesses? I guess this is off topic but it seems like people reading this may have input

shnock• 3 years ago

React? Or back-end with NodeJS

asylteltine2• 3 years ago

I like Django rest framework a lot. It was really easy to make something with react and call Django directly however the templating engine is also great. It’s so strange people still use rails

vanviegen• 3 years ago

It’s so strange people still use rails

Why? What makes Django better? (Genuinely curious.)

collyw5• 3 years ago

I never used Rails, but people who use both said that thy were pretty similar. Python had the advantage of scientific libraries (which was useful for what I was building), while Rails was a bit more web dev focused.

Rails does seem to have fallen out of favor over the last decade, while Django enjoyed a more steady level of popularity. I guess Python is a more popular language.

asylteltine2• 3 years ago

Rails is ruby… so that’s one thing

Rails is much harder to containerize

Rails structure is extremely messy and you have to learn how to do it the rails way. Python in general is easier to hire for and is just better

dopamean• 3 years ago

You should learn a bit about Rails. It wont be strange that people still use it.

jononomo• 3 years ago

Just FYI -- there is so much mature Django and Python code out there than ChatGPT is really an excellent partner when you're building a Django project. Django is frankly the best web framework in existence, IMHO.

local_crmdgeon3• 3 years ago

* if you can accept the flaws in Python for your usecase

st3fan• 3 years ago

Type hints everywhere?

radus2• 3 years ago

No, as I understand it, the Django project's stance on type hints is that they aren't going to be added any time soon, but they are willing to accept small PRs that are needed by external type-checkers on a case by case basis. Details here: https://github.com/django/deps/pull/65

loughnane• 3 years ago

I can’t tell if it’s Django or just how I use it—-I’m a mechanical engineer by training and only dabble on web dev—-but I deeply appreciate how it gives me enough abstraction to get going but doesn’t get too far ahead of itself. If I go away for a year or two then come back I still get what’s going on. Meanwhile anything I try on JS land has gone through a few half-lives.

rglover2• 3 years ago

If you want a similar experience in JS check out Joystick [1]. It's being built to mimic the indefinitely stable design of stuff like Django and Rails.

[1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick

0xblinq• 3 years ago

Which is just yet another js framework which might disappear next month.

That's the problem.

miiiiiike6• 3 years ago

Are there any large sites that use Django Ninja?

I've been using DRF for about a decade and there hasn't been a moment of enjoyment or ease. I adore Django but wish it had an official REST contrib package. [0] With DRF dragging its feet on async (leaving it to a third-party library) I just want to quit.

I'm building a new async api soon, are there any Django Ninja case studies? I can't find anything.

[0]: Using Django..

Me in 2008 — "How do I get data from a PUT/PATCH request without a library?"

Me in 2023 — "How do I get data from a PUT/PATCH request without a library?"

megaman8213• 3 years ago

Django Ninja just hit 1.0 a few weeks ago. I think you are going to have to be patient to find large sites using it in production.

miiiiiike6• 3 years ago

I've never heard of anyone using it in production, period. The one thing FastAPI had going for it back when it was announced was a list of companies and groups with it deployed that minute.

Is it a "1.0 because we think it's done and you should try using it now. Maybe it'll work." Or "This is a solid 1.0 that has been tested in production. You can expect reasonable api stability."

FastAPI launched with option three: "We're going to get our friends to use it in production so we can say it's deployed by Microsoft, but, this is definitely a pre-alpha."

Svetlitski• 3 years ago

While I don’t use it anymore and have been out of the web dev space completely for a few years now, I personally feel I owe a lot to Django. It’s the framework behind the first software I wrote that other people actually used and depended on. While looking back at it now the first Django code I wrote was pretty awful, it’s astonishing how much the framework lets you accomplish. Without knowing much at all about web development or databases, following the Django tutorial is sufficient to get you started with a very basic web app, and you can grow from there. Couple this with the superpower that was deploying to Heroku, and it made for a fantastic introduction to web dev and shipping software to real users.

ajhai• 3 years ago

I've been using Django as my main choice for web projects for over ten years. The reason I like it so much is because it comes with a lot of built-in features that one needs to ship web projects to production. For example, I was first attracted to Django because of its admin interface and its straightforward views and templating system.

Over the years, Django has kept up with changes in web development. An example of this is when database migrations, which used to be a separate project, were integrated into Django itself. The Django community is also strong with great ecosystem projects like DRF for APIs, Django Channels for real-time features, and social-auth for social sign-ins.

My recent use of Django is in (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack). We use Django Channels for WebSocket support, DRF for APIs, and ReactJS for the frontend.

honestduane• 3 years ago

And django-timezone-field and others are not currently compatible, blocking upgrades.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

Be sure to check out the Query base classes (Func, etc), it helps getting over the choice '__prop__func' as syntax.

quantiq• 3 years ago

Django is such a lovely framework I can't speak higher praises of it. I'm blessed to still be able to use it in my day to day work. It's maybe not the most flashy framework out there these days but Django and Rails are really the Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics of the web dev world that often go so underappreciated for their unfussy reliability. :)

anon3738392• 3 years ago

I’d say they’re the Lexuses of the web dev world. Very nicely appointed and rock-solid, just not very sexy.

pwython• 3 years ago

The Lexus LFA would like to have a word with you.

the__alchemist2• 3 years ago

Django owns! The blazingly-fast flask-alikes that come out in Python and Rust every year still can't touch it for building websites.

My only beef is that the official docs and community chats make you feel like you're an outlaw or doing things wrong if you use the raw SQL API.

Regarding this new version in particular, the feature that jumps out at me the most is the improved field choices. I've been using an odd workaround with the decorator API to tie them to python Enums.

Darmody3• 3 years ago

I usually hear this question the other way around but there it goes.

Why should someone consider Django instead of something like Symfony or Laravel?

biorach2• 3 years ago

Because they know, or want to know Python

Darmody3• 3 years ago

Thank you, mister, but I mean from a techy point of view.

Mystery-Machine• 3 years ago

How does Django compare to Ruby on Rails? Any developers in here that tried/used both frameworks?

djstein• 3 years ago

for those keeping up with Django’s async story the biggest updates with Django 5.0 are:

The new asynchronous functions are now provided, using an a prefix: django.contrib.auth.aauthenticate(), aget_user(), alogin(), alogout(), and aupdate_session_auth_hash().

AuthenticationMiddleware now adds an HttpRequest.auser() asynchronous method that returns the currently logged-in user.

[Edit: paste wasn’t the full sentence]

bdcravens• 3 years ago

I work in the Rails world, and perhaps my perception is colored by the big changes they tend to make, but this seems like more of a minor than a major version release? Or is this relatively big for Django?

iamsanteri• 3 years ago

I'd be also interested to hear someone proficient have an opinion about this. A 5.0 update sounds like something big. What about the rest of the async parts in Django having been in the process of being re-written since a while, as I've heard? Also has it ever been considered to build some deeper integration of Celery for enabling and handling in-memory background job processing in a more closely and "better-integrated" way akin to Rails' active job?

Humphrey• 3 years ago

Yes, relative minor update. Django is very mature and does most things needed, so there has not been need for major changes since about 2.0.

Django releases are now based on a schedule, so the 5.0 label wouldn't have been chosen because of significant changes.

But, I have observed that releases often look like this:

- X.0 Newer shinier features

- X.1 More refinement and minor features

- X.2 [LTS] More refinement and minor features

Which means if you stick to the point 2 releases you get longer support and subjectively more stability since the shiny new features have been polished over a couple of point releases.

But in reality these days, I think it's just whatever features are ready to ship for the scheduled release date.

rossant• 3 years ago

What an incredibly powerful, robust, well-documented, carefully-designed piece of open source software. I love Django so much and I use it every day. A huge thanks to all developers and maintainers.

local_crmdgeon3• 3 years ago

Is there a good JS/TS Django replacement? Something mature? I know a few were taking shots at it, but I truly hate Python and have a JS team

local_crmdgeon3• 3 years ago

Did RedwoodJS ever take off?

MugoyaDihfahsih• 3 years ago

Been using Django starting from version 2.2 ever since then the release of new upgrades has been charming. Thanks to the team for the new improvements.

cushychicken• 3 years ago

Know what ChatGpT is real good at?

Writing Django.

Using that to my advantage lately.

kdwikzncba• 3 years ago

Does anyone else find this obsession with expanding database-related features weird?

PrivateButts2• 3 years ago

I loooove Django, any project that I work on that isn't Django causes me to yearn for it greatly. However, there's two things that have been minorly bothering me about it:

- The complete lack of any motivation to support type hints (yes I know about stubs and the other 3rd party).

- The GraphQL situation is a mess. Graphene on again off again development and Strawberry being not quite all the way stable yet sucks compared to how baller DRF is. It's still a massive fight to get subscriptions working well. It would be nice to see the foundation throw them a bone like they did with Channels.

patrick912• 3 years ago

Hi there! I work on Strawberry GraphQL, would be interested in sending me a list of the things that we can do better? You can send me a dm on discord or open an issue on discord, I plan to spend more time on Strawberry next year, so hopefully I can make it good for you!

PrivateButts2• 3 years ago

Sure thing! We have migrated to Strawberry for all our projects going forward, next time I have my hands in those project guts for maintenance I'll document some and send it on.

nprateem2• 3 years ago

Anyone experienced performance improvements by using pypy instead of cpython with django?

rrishi• 3 years ago

Coincidentally, I am just beginning to learn Django.

I have experience with NextJS, Express and Flask.

In the past, Django had intimidated me due to having so many official-sounding files and folder structure and settings etc. So, I had just not given it too much brain cycles.

After having experience with the earlier listed frameworks, I can appreciate some of the things Django gives out of the box. It feels "industry-grade".

Hoping to make fond memories with Django just like the other experiences described here! Happy holidays everyone!

Django 5.0

Related Stories