Web developers face quite a few challenges while building a website, from creating a scalable product to balancing features with simplicity, from managing panels to ensuring app security, and so on. Fortunately, frameworks alleviate much of the load by providing ready-made components. One such web application framework – Django, is free, open-source, and was essentially created with front-end developers in mind.
However, Django is a full-stack framework and incorporates all the essential features. So, let’s see how this server-side framework, with its extensive collection of modules, is advantageous for your project.
1. Django is Powered by Python
In 2021, Python became the third most used programming language among developers worldwide, following JavaScript and HTML/CSS. It is a dynamic, multi-paradigm, and high-level programming language that simplifies the coding and implementation, and is ideal for machine learning.
Likewise, Django is one of the most popular web app frameworks that global companies like Mozilla, National Geographic, The Washington Post, and Spotify use for their development projects. Python and Django work best together as Django allows developers to build complex sites with Python’s easy-to-maintain Syntax. Overall, web application development with the combination of these two requires less effort and shorter code.
2. Django is Exceedingly Scalable
A successful web app seamlessly and efficiently accommodates growth and is designed with scalability in mind. Because of Django’s component-based “shared-nothing” architecture, you can add hardware at any level: database servers, caching servers, or application servers and scale for increased traffic for as many as 400 million users. In addition to maximizing scalability, this also minimizes web hosting costs.
You can also use plugins to extend your web app and utilize numerous packages to scale up your product. Businesses also prefer Django, as it is scalable in the context of performance, security and patches, and team size. With the official Django documentation, one can onboard people in no time and get the team to full productivity much faster.
3. Django is a “Batteries Included Framework”
Django has inherited Python’s “batteries-included” approach, meaning it provides the developers with the libraries and tools to develop a full-fledged application. More than 4,000 packages created by the word-class community are available to cover profiling, testing, and debugging if you need additional features for a complex app. You can import any of these packages, spare the hustle of writing your own code, and save a considerable amount of time.
Some of the widely used “batteries” are Django ORM, Authentication, Django Admin, Middlewares, Multi-site support, HTTP libraries, i18n, template engine, etc.
4. Django Provides Robust Security Features
Django has solid encryption packages and regularly releases new security patches to address various security threats, like clickjacking, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and more. Django’s release schedule clearly outlines that its versions keep receiving security updates for a specific time that might range from 2 to 3 years per release. So, you can rest assured that your release will be secure for as long as three years, even if you don’t upgrade to the latest major release.
The framework has a detailed security policy where you can get information on how Django releases new security patches, and any vulnerability they might have discovered. Moreover, Django has solid user authentication; it hides your website’s source code and lets you know of various common security mistakes.
5. Django is Portable and Compatible with Major OS
These days, users access web apps on various platforms and devices. Django supports all mainstream operating systems, like Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Django’s ORM system (object-relational mapper) works as a layer between developer and database. So, you can execute routine database activities as well as migrate between databases by merely changing a line of code. Besides, many web hosting providers readily provide specific infrastructure for hosting Django sites.
6. Django is SEO Friendly
SEO must be an essential part of each web development project to avoid major issues with search results down the line. A URL that properly reflects the site’s structure and each page’s content enhances its readability for search engine crawlers and the website’s audience.
Fortunately, Django has built-in a SlugField model field that allows you to generate search-engine-friendly strings that further can be used to create readable search-engine-friendly URLs.
Python’s human-readable code is also advantageous in boosting SERP rankings. Besides, Django has various SEO tools, including the Django SEO framework, which helps you reduce page loading times.
Conclusion
Django enables web developers to achieve a perfect balance between performance, development effort, architecture, scalability, and security. With its easy-to-learn, flexible, and highly extensible template language, you can rapidly build secure and maintainable websites having clean and pragmatic design. Thus, it is perfect for both smaller-scale projects and projects that deal with complex functions or technology (e.g., ML) or require handling large volumes of content, user interactions.
Besides, Python has substantial libraries making it easy to learn, implement and adopt. So, if you’ll have to work with Python, particularly for web applications or web design, then the Django framework certainly comes in handy.
