Django is fine for writing a thin CRUD layer around a database. It makes the easy stuff easy. But doesn't seem to help much for the hard stuff and often actively hinders it.
Really the main reason for Django is its ORM and migrations. It's basically the other Python ORM (next to SQLAlchemy) but, unlike SQLAlchemy, it's not designed to be used standalone. In my experience I find Django (and active record ORMs in general) easier for people to get started with, but massively limiting in long run for complex domains.
This assumes that people don't do multi-page apps or sites any more, which ... isn't true. And I believe django-ninja replaces forms/serialization/deserialization and routing, while nicely integrating with everything else.
> Django is fine for writing a thin CRUD layer around a database.
In my dozen or so years with Django, I confess I did more than a few thin CRUD layers around a database. But also worked on billing systems for telecoms, insurance provider API services, live/on demand audio/video streaming services, a bunch of business process apps, AI codegen tools, and other web apps and API backends that were way more than thin CRUD layers around databases.
Django was rarely a hindrance. In fact, Python being sync-only (or Django not supporting async) was usually more of a hindrance that anything Django specific.
> In my experience I find Django (and active record ORMs in general) easier for people to get started with, but massively limiting in long run for complex domains.
In my exprience the only situations where Django's ORM doesn't help much is when you have a lot of business logic in your database (views, stored procedures), or the database is organized in a way that's not Django's preffered way. Still works, mind you, just not as great a experience. However, the vast majority of projects I've encountered have none of those.
Otherwise, I've found its ORM quite powerful, and easy to drop down to raw() in cases where you really need it (which was maybe 1% on the projects I've worked).
+1 on this. Django scales pretty well when adopting a clean architecture like Django Model Behaviours with mixins.
> Otherwise, I've found its ORM quite powerful.
Same. In ten years, the only issue I had is with a very complex query that the ORM was not able to write properly. But a workaround existed.
I'm currently using FastAPI in a project. It's very enjoyable (especially with a strictly typed codebase) but I have to write lots of batteries by myself, which is not very productive (unless you keep this boilerplate code for future projects).
Quick, where would you put a high-level business function that touches multiple models? Where would you put the model-level validation for that? I've seen all of the following: in a view, in a form, in a service-layer function, arbitrarily in one of the models/managers, implicitly in the database schema (just catch the IntegrityErrror!).
There are endless discussions online about where to do this. This isn't a good sign. It should be easy. The business logic should be at the heart of an application. But instead we see Django's ORM at the heart.
Django models are really limiting and totally tied to the database. You can't even have a model that has a list/set of items without getting into ForeignKeys etc. You can't test any of it without having the database present. Why would I need the database to be there to test business logic?! The point of an ORM is to do object persistence, not to do business logic.
So I've seen people do a separate set of ORM models and domain models and then manually mapping between them. This is possible, but it's a whole lot easier with something like SQLAlchemy which is actually designed for that (it's a data mapper rather than active record type ORM).
Then there's stuff like django-admin and ModelForms etc. which are the last thing you want if you're doing more than CRUD.
Tbh it would be utterly remarkable if Django somehow made this stuff easy. But it doesn't and I find myself wishing I just put in the effort to set up the boring stuff like auth etc. but with a proper architecture.
It's just python: `descriptive_name.py`. `ingest_validation.py` etc. If this seems too terse, it's because your question was posed in a general way. If you have more info on the sort of business logic you have in mind, or the sort of data validation, I'll reply with more.
Could you describe what you have in mind regarding models not tied to the database? If it's the naive interpretation I'm thinking of, use python dataclasses and enums. Django models are specifically to represent database schema.
Reading between the lines, perhaps you are looking for something not covered by a web framework? Django's features are for responding to HTTP requests, managing a relational database, auth, email, admin, templates etc. If you're trying to do something not part of this, use other parts of the Python language. Django is a library; Python is the more fundamental tool used to build applications.
Finally, in my opinion, the best reason to not use Django is not the project itself (because it will do the job in 99% case), it's because all you learn is tied to Django.
Having learn Pydantic recently was a breed of fresh air, and I would reuse it in lots of projects, not only web projects.
