On Monday, January 27, 2014 5:44:12 PM UTC-5, damond...@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?
Things do change but some things stay the same. Javascript will continue
to be hated by lotsa people.
You wanted opinions about client-side and server-side being more or less
integrated and you do hedge somewhat saying "depends on the ... app
requirements". I think while there is a performance edge to be gained by
separate frameworks they will persist.
Large scale apps ought to be funded well enough to hire the best
technologists who will obviously choose the best technologies for the
specified requirements. For server-side the Django ORM does it for most
apps while SQL rules. For client-side we'll just have to hire
javascript/CSS/HTML5 resources.
Mozilla is working on Python in the browser built on top of the js
engine. If that works, it is a very small step to an abstraction layer
in all browsers so we js-haters can avoid Javascript altogether.
As soon as we can manipulate the DOM with Python there will be a
plethora of client-side Python frameworks which integrate with
server-side Django.
Then we'll have Python everywhere :)
... and they can do what they like with js
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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