I have built some wonderful UIs with Blazor in drastically less time than I would have spent building a JavaScript UI.
HTMX and might be the closest thing to what I'm describing that is actually available for Django today, though minus the WASM capabilities.
Laravel is so much better than Django, but I just can't go back to PHP at this point.
Same.
During 2024 I evaluated multiple backend platforms/frameworks to get away from Node. Laravel is great and modern PHP (the language) is also surprisingly good but betting on PHP feels like betting on coal and the steam engine. The runtime and execution model are extremely outdated and resource hungry.
There are some efforts like FrankenPHP and Swole that package a PHP app to have a persistent execution model. But IMO unless PHP officially adopts this model this will always feel like a hack to me.
This is not necessarily warranted. Modern PHP is faster than Ruby in many benchmarks; and Rails is still running GitHub and Shopify. Square uses Laravel in a backend serving 100M+ requests per day, with no plans to rewrite. To compare it to a Steam engine and Coal; that’s unfair stereotyping.
On that note, JavaScript’s amount of churn could be an entire discussion by itself. I’ll take some quirky behavior that just keeps working over mindless churn any day.
But I built 3 large successful applications in it in that time. I loved it. I don't use it regularly anymore since I mostly moved away from webdev, but I recently came back into contact with my largest project I build in 2018/2019 and its been running perfect this whole time and was a pleasure to dive back into.
Django just felt logically organized, documentation was on point, core was very readable (at least then).
I always just felt so productive in it. I know everyone has different opinions, experiences and products they are building, but I'm always surprised with the negative comments. I definitely prefer SSR with its reasonable though, so maybe thats part of it.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/releases/3.0/#asgi-sup...
Also, lots of the "batteries included" into Django don't have async interfaces yet.., for example the default auth/permission system will get async functions like acreate_user, aauthenticate, ahas_perm only in 5.2 which is expected in April 2025, so as of now these still have to be wrapped in sync_to_async wrappers to work...
That's when I first came to love Flask. SQLAlchemy will let you model just about anything that looks vaguely database-like, and Flask doesn't really care what ORM (if any) you use.
TL;DR Django's opinionated. If those opinions match what you're trying to do and you can stay on the golden path, it's freaking great! Once you get off in the weeds, it quickly becomes your enemy.
That's a great summary. I wrote a few significant flask apps many years ago as well and I'm a huge fan of SQLAlchemy. My flask apps were greenfield so I ended up building crappier versions of alot that Django provides. I still enjoyed it but I wasn't as productive. But with a legacy integration, it would be hard to beat SQLAlchemy (I think its great for greenfield too). I've basically landed on your comment above as well.
Why even do that? Our app integrates with multiple databases and the Django ORM only knows about one of them. For the rest, we use plain SQL.
Was really wanting to like Django since I'm a python dev for my day job, but it didn't have nearly the amount of DX and tools baked in as Laravel/Rails.
Rails has been super fun, I hadn't touched it in 10 years and the additions that versions 7/8 have brought are awesome.
I work on Windows and I chose a PHP variant (don't remember, maybe one that supports threads or async) that did not work on Windows very well. Starting up a Latavel server took minutes. Took me hours to finally find that the PHP binary itself was the root cause. It should not be that way.
Then installing Compose on Windows was horrible. I believe I had to install PHP and compose in C:\php or it just would not work. The compose "installer" did a bunch of stuff to my Windows which I did not want. Installing it manually was a pain in the ass.
All in all, the experience was exactly the same as in the 2000's (horrible).
After I setup my first Latavel project and had some question, it was really difficult to get answers. The docs are really good, but also fragmented as hell with all the approaches one could take to rendering content, depending on what you choose and how you approach it. The forums - although big - seemed dead when I stated my question.
I don't know man, my experience with Django is so much better.
My usage of PHP has been using software written by other people but customising - and there is a lot of useful stiff written in PHP. I prefer Python if doing something from scratch, but I would rather write a small amount of PHP to add a bit of functionality rather than write 10× the amount of Python because I need to write everything from scratch.
https://www.django-unicorn.com/
Wouldn't be WASM based either, but most of these types of tech aren't (yet?). I'm in the livewire camp with Laravel. I found a bit discussion of a webassembly version of livewire, but I don't think it's on the cards any time soon.