[bb88]

Django/DRF are fine for API's particularly with DRF Spectacular to generate the Open API specs. DRF couples tightly to the ORM and plays nicely with the Django DB models.

FastAPI will have more boilerplate, but I'm not sure that's an issue anymore in the age of AI coding assistants.

HTMX is also wonderful for both. It's a nice tech for lightweight SPAs. If you're going to go deeper into the JS side you can look at some of the more mature frameworks. I've been kinda partial to Vue.js.

And if you really want to go crazy there's pyscript from anaconda.

[seabrookmx]

DRF's serializers make it really easy to generate N+1 queries and it's a very opinionated framework that doesn't share many opinions with other frameworks. There is also no plan to bring async support to DRF, even though it's already present in Django itself.

If you want to make a Django API these days I'd lean towards django-ninja which essentially bolts Pydantic onto Django, in a similar fashion to how FastAPI leverages Pydantic ontop of an async flask-like framework.

I personally would just use FastAPI but I understand lots of folks have invested heavily in (or prefer) Django's ORM to raw SQL or Alchemy.

[bb88]

There's a lot to like about the Django ORM. And Django still has it's place.

What I'd like is a SQL that creates and consumes a JSON structure as output/input, and then there wouldn't really be a need to serialize/deserialize anything. Python would be a lightweight wrapper for authentication, error handling, logging, and data processing that couldn't be easily done with SQL.

I mean people are trying this, but SQL feels so arcane. If you have tabular data and working with spreadsheets, SQL is great. And the JSON support in postgres is a badly bolted on design choice to force tree style data into tabular data.

Instead they should modify SQL to process tree style data as tree style data.

[eigenvalue]

There is a JSON column type in SQLite now, and it's supported by SQLModel/SQLalchemy:

https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html

[bb88]

There's a JSONB column type in postgres for a while now too with the arrow syntax.

I think my point is that the structure of the data in a relational database is tree-like. Yet we can only get tabular data out of the queries.

[eigenvalue]

FastAPI automatically generates the openapi.json file for you, which is how it's able to also give you the Swagger page "for free" once you've defined the route structure. It's very convenient.