Re: Do you think Django's future is threatened by JS frameworks in both client & server?

It makes for an interesting debate and food for thought.

Python has a lot of libraries and user contributions which can speed up development, but like every language, has it's good sides and bad sides.

Django holds a strong position, libraries such as south, pipeline, mongoengine, uWSGI and the Django ORM itself make it incredibly easy to get clean code quickly out the door.

Personally I think the biggest risk to Django's future is lack of public contributions (separate debate), and evolution being held back for backwards compatibility reasons (again, separate debate), rather than any threat from new kids on the block. I would be quite surprised if NodeJS (as an example) overtook Django in terms of functionality and popularity.

Disclaimer: I'm +1 python and -0 JS, and thus slightly biased. 

Cal

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:44 PM, <damondeville@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I would like to know if this community is somewhat worried about the future relevance of Django (and other purely server-side MV* Python web app frameworks such as web2py for that matter) given the current momentum of JavaScript (JS) everywhere?

There are many competing architecture patterns for a WHOLE web app today ranging:

a)  from client-heavy SPA with a client-side MVC framework synching its models via a REST API with a server-side reduced to a database access layer

b) to light client apps with a server-side MVC frameworks and very little or no Ajax 

c) and everything in the middle.

I guess it is not too controversial to say that which is best (or even merely adequate) depends on the generally moving target of the app requirements (especially the non-functional ones) and thus a long lifecycle app can be expected to have to change pattern at some point.

Given that:

1) full web apps following any pattern can today be developed exclusively with JavaScript (JS) frameworks on both sides who have incorporated most (if not all) great design ideas from Django (and Rails)

2) IDEs ranging from Visual Studio to browser-based ones are available to support such development

3) Python in the browser projects do not yet provide productive debugging support (and will they ever without support from a tech giant?)

4) Cloud giants (Amazon, Google, Heroku, Microsoft) all offering JS framework running servers

are the productivity gains from the more legible, concise and abstract Python code as compared to JS code really compensate the productivity loss of having to port part of the app from one language to other every time it must be pushed from one side (say server) to the other (say client), or even to maintain a code base in two languages instead of one?

Why then adopt Django (or web2py) for a new project today, instead of going pure JS?

I am a big Python fan in terms of design and principles, but I am fearing that it has started to lose the popularity/adoption/community size battle against JS, which, from a pragmatic productivity standpoint is relevant and thus potentially snowballing after a tipping point is reached. Trends are deadly fast in web development, cf. how quickly J2EE+static HTML, then J2EE+Flash and .NET+Silverlight have fallen from grace.

Any thought on this?

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