django question

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.4972.1388957900.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:

> Integration is one of the things that Django does particularly well:
> out of the box, you get a web framework, database abstraction (ORM),
> templating, out-of-the-box functionality, and PHENOMENAL
> documentation. The others just bring the web-framework to the table
> and *you* then have to choose your templating engine (and ORM if
> you're using one).  Some people see this as an advantage, some see it
> as a disadvantage.  If you like a particular templating engine (Mako,
> Jinja, etc) or ORM (SQLAlchemy, SQLObject, etc), you /can/ use them in
> Django or other frameworks, but in Django, you'd be fighting the
> Django Wayâ„¢ and don't get to take advantage of some of the tight
> integration in areas where it does some of the hard work for you
> (such as integration into the admin interface).

On the other hand, it's all modular enough that it's quite reasonable to 
plug in your own components.

For example, at Songza, we don't use the django ORM at all (we use 
mongoengine).  We also have a number of django-based services which 
don't use templates at all (we return JSON objects).  Neither of these 
required any major surgery to do this.

In fact, for a lot of what we do, all we really get from django is the 
request parsing, URL routing, middleware scaffolding, and cache 
interface.  But, that's enough to be worthwhile.

> I haven't found it to be that easy to directly transition projects
> between Django and other frameworks.

One of the things we try to do is put as little in the views as 
possible.  Views should be all about accepting and validating request 
parameters, and generating output (be that HTML via templates, or JSON, 
or whatever).  All the business logic should be kept isolated from the 
views.  The better (and more disciplined) you are about doing this, the 
easier it will be to move your business logic to a different framework.

That's not to say it will be *easy*, but you can certainly make things 
harder on yourself than they need to be if you don't keep things 
distinct.

Oh, and yes, the django team does a really amazing job on the docs.