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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

This has an explanation of the motivation for this project:

https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/motivation/

It sounds super interesting, it fits the middle ground between Django Rest Framework and FastAPI taking the best of both. Full support for Django and particularly it’s ORM (hard to do with FastAPI as the Django ORM is not yet async and can’t be used with FastAPI)

I like that it supports both sync and async as I’m personally not convinced about the use of async Python everywhere. I could see this being brilliant for an api where the majority is simple sync code but with a few endpoint with long running responses or where you need multiple concurrent requests to DBS or other APIs.

(Edited for clarity, thanks vladvasiliu)

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> Full support for Django and particularly it’s ORM (hard to do with FastAPI as the ORM is not yet async)

I think you may have it backwards. Django's ORM isn't async yet [1], whereas FastAPI doesn't actually have an "included" ORM. However, the docs give an example of an async ORM [2], and SQLAlchemy also has async support [3].

---

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/topics/async/: We’re still working on async support for the ORM

[2] https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/advanced/async-sql-databases/

[3] https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/14/orm/extensions/asyncio.htm...

No, sorry, did have it right but wasn't clear in my sentence:

Full support for Django and particularly it’s ORM (hard to do with FastAPI as the Django ORM is not yet async and can’t be used with FastAPI)

Will edit to make clear.

This isn’t exactly true. The Django ORM can be used with care in the async views found in FastAPI and Django (see sync_to_async and run_in_threadpool helpers).

Plans exist to make the Django Queryset async, so it’ll be exciting when that day comes!

Very true, and I have been following this pull request implementing Async Queryset with interest:

https://github.com/django/django/pull/14843

So far they are only going down the the queryset level, it then uses a thread pool for the db connector, next job would be to support async db connections.

The author of FastApi wrote an ORM too:

https://github.com/tiangolo/sqlmodel

I have not yet used it, but I think that’s the best approach now

Whats the deal with they large number of open issues an pull requests on FastAPI and SQLModel?

SQLModel 100 issues, 54 open PRs

FastAPI 903 issues, 448(!!) open PRs

I recently had to choose between Flask and FastAPI for a fresh project and went with Flask in the end, partly due to long term maintenance concerns with FastAPI.

There was a recent discussion about it here including a reply from the FastAPI creator explaining the situation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471609

Having given SqlModel a very proper go a few months back, I have to say that it's not worth using it just yet. There are too many outstanding issues and the documentation is also incomplete. Maybe in a year's time, the situation could be different.

A good Django like ORM for FastAPI is Ormar [1]. I've got PG specific extensions to Ormar in [2].

1. https://github.com/collerek/ormar 2. https://github.com/tophat/ormar-postgres-extensions/

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