In this article, we are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Django Framework. Since Django was implemented using the MVC design pattern, all the advantages and disadvantages of the MVC design pattern are contained in Django. Along with that, these are some Django-specific things, and we’ll take a look at them.
Advantages of Django Framework
It is easy to use and implement, and programmers benefit from it since it saves a lot of development time. Different components may be worked on simultaneously by different groups of professionals – for example, designers can work on the “view” component, while developers or programmers can work on the controller part. The DB engineers and admins can use the same time to optimize the entire database, so all three components can work on simultaneously. From the Django perspective, it means that the different groups (designers, developers, and DB professionals) can simultaneously work on template files, views.py files, and models.py files.
Asynchronous views.py function
Django also supports asynchronous views.py function calls, so responsive web apps and mobile backbends well supported. It saves the end-users time and provides the user with satisfaction. One can write JQuery or xmlHttp calls from a given application screen without disturbing it and get a response while the user is busy with something else.
REST APIs
Django allows programmers to create extensive web applications and REST APIs with the least amount of effort. It provides the programmer with an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) to manipulate values in database tables through instances of classes defined in the models.py file. The programmer need not write complex SQL statements to handle the data directly. However, Django also allows the flexibility to let the programmer write actual SQL statements if she chooses to do it.
HTTP(S) Protocol
Django provides the programmer with 2 excellent classes to handle HTTP(S) protocol – HttpRequest and HttpResponse. The views.py function takes an HttpRequest object as a function parameter and returns an instance of the HttpResponse class. The APIs provided by these above classes are so well designed that one can manipulate every aspect of the request and response objects.
Modification of one component doesn’t affect any other component. For example, one may add some fields to a models.py class, but doing that won’t affect the views.py functions. The views.py won’t be able to get the values of the new fields in the models.py class. But that won’t cripple the existing views.py.
Disadvantages of the Django framework
Some of the advantages listed above can also be disadvantages in specific scenarios. Let's take a look at the disadvantages.
- If the programmer wants to make only a couple of pages for an internet site, then Django is often an enormous headache. The programmer has got to do tons of overhead activities to implement an easy 3 or 4-page website. For small projects, Django is not suitable. No point firing a cannon to kill a fly.
- If the web application created that contains a lot of tables in a relational database and each action in the views.py file is complex enough to retrieve values from more than one table at once, then Django may come in the way of doing it. We mentioned above that it is possible to write a SQL statement in Django, but it is not advisable to use it frequently. In such a scenario, a better solution would be to create the web app without using Python Django development And write all the complex SQL statements and optimize them in the code.
- It has to be kept in mind that not every web/mobile app will fall in line with the MVC pattern. Certain web applications (usually very data-intensive, such as face recognition systems) must implemented using the “Actor” pattern or any other pattern that suitable for it. Django is not very useful in such circumstances.
Conclusion
Thus, as discussed above, when building a web application or mobile application backend. Or a REST API, we first need to identify whether Django will serve our purpose. If so, we can use Django, but if not, we shouldn’t be forced to implement our application using Django. It is a matter of design, and therefore, a bad decision at that stage can ruin the entire application.
