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Comment by qooleot | Hacker News Reader

I work on several Django apps, and also write advanced SQL in Postgres (CTEs, plv8 functions, materialized views, etc.). One thing the ORM allows though is writing a custom sql query and its pretty easy to 'cast' the sql results into a Django model.

With that said, its still sometimes a struggle to justify if almost all the queries are highly custom, and the app doesn't require Django Admin. Certainly there are advantages, but the minimalism of Flask and focusing on the REST interface for integration and building micro services is more appealing in some cases.

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If one wants to use these Postgres features, Flask without an ORM is the way to go. Django is too constraining, especially with its primary key limiting.

If you use Django without the ORM, why would it be any more constraining than Flask?

I usually try to keep my queries within the ORM, as it means things like sorting and pagination become very easy, but its lacking in certain areas.

It's not necessarily more constraining, but from my perspective there are two reasons to choose Django over other python frameworks: the ORM and the out-of-the-box Admin (which depends on the ORM). If you take those away, there is no good reason, in my opinion, to choose Django over, say, Tornado.

I wouldn't choose Flask for anything; it's too slow, even by the relatively poor standards set by Tornado and Django.

The admin has stopped m going to another framework before.

My additional reasons for choosing Django over a minimalist framework:

There is a large selection of third party add ons for Django. I had a look around I couldn't find anything like reversion for any other framework (maybe it exists, but I didn't find it).

There are a standard set of components, so you get a default choice. These will work together and likely have some consistency in the way they get used. Choosing your own components for Flask (or whatever framework), they may well work together, or you may get problems.

> wouldn't choose Flask for anything; it's too slow, even by the relatively poor standards set by Tornado and Django.

What are your picks for good and fast web frameworks which are also light weight?

You can work around a lot of django's ORM limitations and end up with something that's less laborious and error prone than writing SQL for everything.

Same goes with Doctrine.

You can write crazy complex hydrators, or use simple result set mapping for populating custom query results into objects.

Nearly all of my complex queries for some analytics software I wrote lives in sql statements that aren't inlined in the EntityRepository of a specific entity. ORM's are nice, but doing complex stuff in DQL (doctrine) or the other query builders is more hassle than its worth.

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