Continuing with our discussion of choosing a framework in an age of endless options, we now arrive at one of the most popular Python frameworks today that is widely used for the purpose of Back-End Development. Django is a free, open-source, high-level fully-featured server-side web framework that is aimed at encouraging rapid development of secure and maintainable websites and promoting pragmatic design practices. Because of its active, responsive and thriving community,  detailed documentation and free-for-all approach, it has become one of the most popular server-side web frameworks available in the market today. 

Developed around July 2005, Django is a semi-opinionated web-development framework, which provides a set of tools and components aimed at handling common tasks in web development in a few different ways, borrowing from several common code and design patterns. Its decoupled architectural style allows developers to choose from a wide range of options and add support for new ones should we choose to add them. It follows a batteries-included philosophy which implies that the common functionality for building web applications will be bundled in the form of a framework rather than as separate libraries. Django also follows the MVT architecture – Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which allows a developer to change the visual aspects of an application or the business logic of the application without either one affecting the other. 

Let us take a look at some of the merits and benefits that Django provides that has made it one of the most popular languages in the market today :-  

  • Rapid Development – Because of Django’s loosely coupled MVC architecture format, Django offers the possibility of rapid development for developers using it. This allows us to work on different components parallelly and can be integrated more easily.
  • Faster Processing – Since Django’s architecture is different from other frameworks in the industry, it makes the process of transmitting over the Internet easier and faster as the resources can be put on a CDN. Since the Django server is adept at handling these cases,  it provides considerably faster processing speed in comparison to other frameworks.
  • Scalability – Django is a highly scalable framework. Its use in multiple websites like Instagram, BitBucket, YouTube and Quora shows that it is  highly scalable. We can take a lot of decisions with respect to enhancing the scalability of our Django application such as separate servers for the database, media and the application itself, along with use clustering or load-balancing for the same.
  • Built-In Admin Feature – Django offers an administrative interface to its users that is professional and versatile to be able to manage our data with basic CRUD operations. This admin interface is very useful and provides great convenience to all developers. 
  • Batteries Included – Django provides a battery-included functionality which means that  the common functionality for building web applications will be bundled in the form of a framework rather than as separate libraries. Django batteries span a wide range such as authentication with auth package, admin interfacing with admin package, session management with sessions package etc. 

Thus, we can see the Django framework has many merits and benefits that make it extremely popular among all developers. In the next article in these series, we shall be taking a look at some other backend frameworks.

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