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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Given new entrants into the backend space, like Supabase (for a Firebase-like open source alternative), Hasura (open source GraphQL on Postgres), etc, how viable is Django and similar technologies like Rails these days? It seems like the former are PaaS which you can simply drop into your app but the latter are more so full on backends that let you control everything.

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>Given new entrants into the backend space, like Supabase (for a Firebase-like open source alternative), Hasura (open source GraphQL on Postgres), etc, how viable is Django and similar technologies like Rails these days? It seems like the former are PaaS which you can simply drop into your app but the latter are more so full on backends that let you control everything.

How viable? More viable than the newer systems you mentioned, clearly.

Backends aren’t just npm packages you throw away with each new project or iteration. Rails has an amazing ecosystem around it and tons of competent developers that can write maintainable code and others that can maintain it. Same with Django. You might be surprised that PHP is still extremely popular.

What might surprise him/her even more is that PHP is actually better than js/react at anything web related. Symfony and Laravel are amazing frameworks. You get frontend scaffolding and admin generation,fast templating languages, authentication, authorization, databases, great tooling. On top of that PHP 8.0 improved the type system and these frameworks are quickly adapting to use types everywhere.

When it comes to web applications tho, Django is not as pollished as Laravel/Symfony. There is no webpack integration (or any other npm frontend tool). built-in authentication is very basic, hosting is a pain.

The thing is a haven't written a single line of code in Django, but modern PHP and it's ecosystem looks more fun from a front-end, JS developer's perspective

How can you say Django is not as polished when you haven't even used it?

Laravel is a great framework, but the tooling in PHP is amateur hour by comparison. The app ecosystem in Django is only comparable to Rails'.

> but the tooling in PHP is amateur hour by comparison

Looks like maybe the ignorance goes both ways? People really underestimate the size and maturity of the PHP web development ecosystem and it's professional community, and there's no shortage of tooling to build and support apps on the language.

Django: 34,019, Laravel: 26,881, Rails: 9,300

https://github.com/topics/django

https://github.com/topics/laravel

https://github.com/topics/rails

and Symfony: 25,800

https://github.com/symfony/symfony

Modern PHP ecosystem is a shadow of their former self, in a positive way.

Composer shored up package management. Laravel and Symfony offer robust framework ecosystems. PHP 7 bridged the performance gap with HHVM. Libraries for a wide-range of critical infrastructure services from databases (Postgres, MySQL, Elasticache, Redis) to messaging systems (AMQP, Kafka, ) to monitoring and observability (New Relic/DataDog, Prometheus, Sentry). Cloud support is ubiquitous.

Even the top packages are pedestrian things like logging, event dispatching, sub-process management, and testing.

But PHP has a Microsoft-level of baggage, and those bridges can't be unburned.

The vast majority of those frameworks will not make it past two or three years until maintainers give up or the usebase switches to the next shiny thing.

Rails and Django are the pieces of web tech most likely to stay in the game.

I run Hasura and Django. Django really excels at migrations and Django is nice to have a place to write admin views. For example a way to generate a report and manipulate the data in a way that is easy to use. No way to do that in Hasura.

At least initially a lot of the GraphQL implementations resulted in slower apps, way more time to get going etc. This may have been because they seemed to tilt towards NoSQL backends, so that may be a big help if that is changing. I always did use views in PostgreSQL. Not graphQL, but you can simplify your request cycle using that if needed.

it's been awhile so the details are fuzzy but the Django shop I worked at had a repository of their like master app template, customized to rapidly prototype the kinds of apps the company built. it was pretty quick to get going on a new project but it was a bit of a kitchen-sink approach that pulled in quite a bit of cruft you might not need, but it was alright for our purposes. I assume other places do something similar.

I do a template type of project structure and the rest are shared libs or git modules.

It's pretty fast to prototype and then cut stuff you don't need.

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