[monkey26]

I don't want to hijack this thread, but what does Django do?

I ask, cause I have a service that is a Rust backend (kind of specialized in what it does) + a SolidJS frontend... But I've seen a potential area for growth, I didn't imagine at first, and that would be stuff like user profiles, authentication, and managing stuff. And I really don't want to cut all this more "CRUD" like stuff in Rust and an SPA. I don't know Ruby, but have done some rather large Python projects in the past, just never ventured into Django land.

[legostormtroopr]

Out of the box Django offers: authentication, database management and migration, a web server, a template engine, URL routing, and probably more - pretty much everything an app needs in a single framework.

[ensignavenger]

Django also has some GIS tools builtin if you need to do anything with geographic data. It has a solid library of error handling, messages, and web security tooling you will probably need, and, the third party ecosystem, both Djano specific modules and the wider Python ecosystem are very powerful.

[halfcat]

Django has all that built in: auth, users, CRUD.

It comes with a built in admin portal that lets you work with all your data in list views and detail views, with sorting, filtering, and searching. For a lot of scenarios you can get away with just using the admin portal (like we have accounting people log in there and import CSV files, etc).

It’s great for managing a data model, setting up a database schema and managing the migrations for you. And once that is setup it’s pretty trivial to enable API endpoints to do all the CRUD-style stuff, if needed.

[eszed]

Nothing against Django, just suggesting another option: Laravel offers the same "out of the box" tools that Django does. Django is built with Python, Laravel with PHP. Someone will be along in a moment to start the flame wars about why one or the other or both totally suck, but for your purposes it's most important to choose the language and approach that will be most comfortable to you.

[TheCapeGreek]

Yeah, these days I'd put Laravel and Rails pretty toe-to-toe on features and productivity. Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

[avtar]

> Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

In what ways does Django lag behind Rails or Laravel?

[TheCapeGreek]

The ecosystems.

Laravel's first-party ecosystem, both paid and free, on top of the framework is quite widespread. This also brings a lot of people to the party on the third party side with excellent tools like Filament and Ploi. I don't see this nearly as much for Django. Have a look under the Ecosystem tab on the Laravel homepage. Within a few `composer install`s, you can get:

- Local dev environment (i.e. actually running the app): Herd, Sail

- Stripe/Paddle support: Cashier, Spark

- Starter kit scaffolds including all the usual auth goodies (e.g. 2FA): Breeze, Jetstream

- View layer alternatives to plain old HTML views: Livewire, Inertia

- API and Social logins: Passport, Sanctum (for SPAs), Socialite

- Fulltext search: Scout

- Robust APM: Pulse, and Telescope on dev

- Admin panels: Nova, and 3rd party Filament

- Websockets: Echo, Reverb (coming soon)

- Infrastructure, both traditional and serverless: Forge, Envoyer, Vapor, Ploi

- Completely alternative PHP runners to replace php-fpm: Octane with Roadrunner, Swoole, or FrankenPHP

- Automated browser testing: Dusk

You can find Django packages for these things too, but I struggle to see many of them coming from the actual Django team. I also think the Django Admin solution is very neat for getting off the ground, but doesn't seem as robust as Nova or Filament.

Lastly, call it my bias, but Python's overall lacklustre developer experience with package and environment management (compared to Composer and Ruby gems) also affects Django as a result.

[avtar]

Thanks so much for the thorough reply! Especially including ecosystem details.

[justech]

Also PHP has Laravel Spark[0]. They basically bootstrapped a SaaS but for a price. Not sure if it's worth it, but it's from the guys who made Laravel, and everyone only has good things to say about that so...

[0] https://spark.laravel.com