When it comes to choosing a new language or framework for a project what matters to most of the developers?
Simplicity? Reliability? Built-in packages to save a lot of time? Security? Rapid development? Community support? Versatility? or what?….. Well, we can’t deny that we always want a language or framework that can fulfill most of the requirements and can provide a lot of features. Python is one of them and we all know the hype of this language and its frameworks in the tech industry.
Due to so many features and capability to build various kinds of applications, this language is now one of the best choices of developers. When it comes to starting your programming journey, python is the topmost priority for beginners. There are various languages and frameworks available in the market but choosing the best one that fulfills most of the requirements can be a tough task for the organizations. If we talk about the Python-based framework then …Django is one of the popular ones for building web-based applications.
For building highly scalable web applications with a constantly growing audience (e.g. content-based or news sites), Django is the topmost priority among the developer’s community. The framework is clear and simple, fast, and reliable, flexible, and scalable. Django has a huge loyal contributing community and this framework helps you to get your job done with fewer lines of code. Instead of spending time on built-in components, it allows developers to focus on building new components. According to SimilarTech, there were 77, 278 websites built with Django till May 2019.
But why Django is gaining so much popularity and why some top companies like Disqus, Instagram, Youtube, The Washington Post are using this framework? Let’s discuss the top reasons why companies are using this framework and why you should also choose this framework for your next project. Let’s start first with the types of application you can build with Django…
- Content management systems
- Social networking and bookmarking sites that facilitate communication
- Booking engines and e-commerce sites
- Financial websites that allow you to calculate results based on personal data, risk tolerance, the probability of achieving the goal.
- Custom CRM systems for internal data
- Document management systems
- Android and iOS mobile apps that support web applications
- Platforms for handling legal issues like verifying mortgage conditions or lease status.
Top Reasons To Use Python Django
1. Built With Python So Easy to Learn
We all know that Python is simple, easy to read, and easy to learn. A lot of beginners choose this language as their first programming language for coding because of its simplicity and easy learning curve. Colleges and universities are using this language to teach coding to the students. Not just beginners but also tech experts are using this language for data science, machine learning, and in various other fields.
Python is a pretty much stable language and Django inherits a lot of key benefits of Python. If we look at the core stuff of Django all the exceptions files and codes are written in Python. So learning Django is also easy if you know how to code in Python.
2. Cross-Platform
Django is a portable framework and you can run its code on any platform including PC, Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. The cross-platform nature of this framework allows developers to support all the development and production environment. Django has a layer called ORM (object-relational mapper) between the developer and the database. With the help of this layer, you can migrate the whole project to other major databases with few lines of change in the code.
3. Open Source and Huge Community Support
Django is a free and open-source framework available on Github. There are almost 2k+ contributors and many more are joining every day. It is supported by the huge community of developers and the code is always updated by the developers who use it. A lot of new libraries are also introduced by the community to solve coding related issues that developers often face while building a project.
If you search for something that how a specific thing can work in Django, chances are higher that your problem is already solved by some other developer in the community and you will get the solution easily as soon as your problem arises. Plenty of mailing lists, blogs, documentation, Slack channels, meetups, workshops, and other online resources are available for this framework.
4. Batteries Included
Django is popular for “batteries included” which means you can find almost everything to develop a full-fledged application. These batteries include ORM, Authentication, HTML templating, session management support, URL routing, Middlewares, HTTP libraries, Multi-site support, i18n, template engine, forms, view layers, model layers, python compatibility, etc. The frameworks offer tons of libraries and tools for common use cases. This kind of huge support allows developers to focus on the thing that matters most instead of reinventing the wheel for everything.
5. Security
One of the best things about Django is that you can build the application at a faster speed and deliver it without compromising the security of the application. Security features are enabled by default in this framework. It has built-in protection for some common security issues such as cross-site scripting, request forgery, clickjacking, and SQL injection. Django releases new security patches quite often and it immediately responds to the security vulnerabilities and alerts other frameworks.
6. Built-in Admin UI
In most of the frameworks you need to create the admin panel on your own and that takes a lot of time. Django offers a fully-featured web interface that is generated automatically for every app you build. The admin panel is well structured and it allows developers to create/update/delete users and any other database objects specific to the app. As per your need, you can customize or modify the admin panel user interface and add a dashboard using the third-party applications and wrappers.
You also get permission and authentication modules out of the box. You don’t need to spend weeks or days to build it from scratch. In most of the apps for building user profiles, you need various details such as username, email, address, phone number, etc. Django provides most of the necessities that you need for the user profile. This kind of huge support is not available in a lot of frameworks or libraries.
7. ORM (Object-relational mapper)
Django offers a fully functional ORM, compatible with a number of databases. Basically ORM is a library that helps developers to interact with databases and allows them to transfer the data automatically from the databases (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL) to the objects. You can work with multiple databases at once.
Some technologies such as Eloquent, greenDAO, Yii AR, etc handle the basic queries very well but at some point, if the ORM fails to address the use case you will have to write the raw queries. This is not the case with Django. It is well built and it handles the database queries very well.
Django ORM example: # gets top 5 results where rank = 15 and age <= 35 top_young_employees = Employee.objects.filter(rank=15, age__lte=35)[:5] # inserts a record with specified values employee = Employee.objects.create(name=’Smith’, age=40, country=’IN’) # prints field value print(employee.name)
Django ORM’s ability to pull out the data speed up the application development process. You don’t need to know the language used for database communication to manipulate data. Also, you can switch between multiple relational databases with fewer lines of additional code. So for a project, if you’re using SQLite for local development, you can switch to MySQL in production.
8. DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
In programming code-reusability or following the DRY principle is really important, especially when you are updating the code regularly. When you follow the DRY principle you just don’t use the existing code, you also avoid the unnecessary lines of code, bugs, or errors in the application. With the DRY principle, you can get most out of very little code and that saves a lot of time of developers when it comes to making your code work or modifies the code for any reason.
In most of the framework, you need to make efforts to make your code DRY compliant, and every time it’s not possible to keep checking your code, especially when you’re working in a team. Django follows the DRY principle and it is designed in such a way that you have to go out of your way to violate the DRY principle. This feature allows you to re-use the existing code and focus on the unique one.
class Customers(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=130)
email = models.EmailField(null=True, blank=True)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(blank=True, null=True, auto_now_add=True)
updated_at = models.DateTimeField(blank=True, null=True, auto_now=True)
In the above code, if you need to change the field `max_length` or something else, you can do it here and the changes will be reflected automatically to all routes, validation, and database.
9. Scalable and Reliable
Today every startup or company is concerned about the scaling of the application. What if the website hits scale and it needs to handle the heavy traffic and large volume of information? Surely you need to use the framework that can handle the huge amount of data. Well, Django is able to tackle the project of any size either it’s a small scale web application or it’s a high loaded web application.
Django comes with a series of wired components, ready to go by default. These components are decoupled, so as per the requirement or specific solutions in an application, development can be scaled up or scaled down by replacing or unplugging the components.
Django is a very popular and widely used web application framework across the industries. This is the reason a lot of cloud service providers are taking all measures to deploy the application fast and easily on their platforms. Take the example of Heroku. Once it is set up, you can enable the deployment and manage the application with a single command from any authorized developer. Django experts working in these areas develop a more functional, reliable, and efficient application.
10. Good Documentation
For quick reference, good documentation for any framework or language matters a lot especially when we get stuck somewhere during the development phase of any project. Django provides well-organized documentation with example code which is very helpful in building different kinds of real-world applications. The documentation is good for quick reference if you are building some features in your application or you are stuck with some issues in your code.
