Django – Is Windows a Second-Class Citizen in the Django Community?

djangohostingpythonwindows

I'm currently doing R&D for a web application which we plan to host ourselves initially and then allow customers to self host.

My task has been evaluating web frameworks to see which would give us the biggest productivity initially and ease of maintence while also allowing us to easily support deployment to customer controlled environments.

Our team has experience with ASP.NET (MVC and Webforms) and Ruby on Rails.

Our experience with Rails is that Windows deployment is a very taboo subject and any questions on IRC or StackOverflow are met with knee jerk "why not Linux" responses. However in this case our target market may be running windows or Linux servers.

Is this also the case in Django land?
Is it possible with rubbish performance?
Is it possible with lost of pain?
Is it seen as reasonable and not treated as a completely stupid idea for not wanting to run Linux?

Best Answer

Windows is a second class citizen in most open source communities because it treats them as second class citizens. Development and sysadmin on Windows is unnecessarily painful, especially for people who are used to Unix-based systems.

That said, Python on Windows works very well and Django doesn't do anything particularly abnormal so I don't see why you wouldn't be able to make it work.

I suspect the main issues won't be with Django itself, but the surrounding stuff like mod_wsgi, etc. Windows is bound to get in your way at some point.

"Why not Linux" is a valid question to ask. The cost of one additional server vs the extra time required to deal with Windows will likely decide the answer.

Related Solutions

Controller in Django MVC – Explanation and Role

Your thoughts are not wrong. In MVC web-frameworks, people often speak of a Base Controller that performs the routing of a request to the actual Controller that handles the request.

This has come about because web frameworks generally have a single point where the request is received by the application and in pure MVC terms, this is where the job of the Controller starts.

The Django framework uses a non-idiomatic way of naming the parts of the MVC triad.

The mapping between Django names and the idiomatic terminology is:

Idiomatic term | Django term | Meaning
Model          | Model       | Contains all the business logic. At the very least the database access logic
View           | Template    | Responsible for generating the HTML and other UI
Controller     | View        | Contains the logic to tie the other parts together and to generate a response to a user request

Web-development – Django – separation from the frontend (Templates)

So you need to show different states of your application -- a landing page, a list of cars, a single car's details, a procedure with a set of forms and prices etc for when you actually buy the car, et cetera.

There are two basic approaches: either have a single "page", a single HTML file with a load of Javascript that constantly updates the page and shows you the different things that need to be shown, or have generate separate HTML for each view on the server side and use links to URLs to have the browser go to each page.

If you choose the first, you use some frontend framework like Angular or React and only ask Django for data, typically JSON using REST (see Django REST Framework). The second, you use Django templates.

That's the basic choice -- do you build the interface in the web browser and only call the server for data, or do you build the interface on the server and call the server for HTML pages.

I think that with your level of experience, using Django templates to create HTML pages is easier; making a single page app probably more than doubles what you need to learn, and there is so much already. A web page to sell used cars can be made perfectly well using Django views and templates.

You can still have some Javascript where needed, and let Ajax call Django views that return bits of JSON, possibly using Django REST framework.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Controller in Django MVC – Explanation and Role

Web-development – Django – separation from the frontend (Templates)

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