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Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

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310 points brylie | 3 comments | 29 Mar 25 03:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.525s | source
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miiiiiike ◴[29 Mar 25 08:50 UTC] No.43513898[source]▶
Related, "Django's REST (Framework) Problem" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43510495

I'm not sure that many people who rely on Django Rest Framework are aware that last month the bug tracker was made private and the project is looking for new maintainers.

I love Django but the project needs to go through something similar to Angular's renaissance (and Angular needs to learn from Django docs.) I'd love to help but it seems that most of the efforts to address the issue have been stalled in committee.

A fork probably isn't the answer but something needs to be done. If it's a money issue, pass the plate! Whenever I talk to Django devs about contributing the feeling that I'm left with is that I could put in years of work, jump through every hoop, and at the end of it they may still say "We're not sure."

The feeling that I've gotten is that the Django dev community is very small and tight-knit. Whenever I've talked about helping out on various projects I've walked away with the feeling that their friend is handling it and they'd rather leave them to it. The community has been trained, through years of reinforcement, to wait instead of getting involved.

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1. grahameb ◴[29 Mar 25 17:26 UTC] No.43517059[source]▶
Yep – I've been using Django since 2007. The big win used to be the admin, ORM, database migrations... but now oddly enough a lot of that has become a pain. I'm someone who knocks small solutions together for fun or to scratch and itch, so I'm looking for low maintenance. The problem I need solved has shifted and now Django is too much boilerplate (APIs and models are perhaps too distant as concepts), and too much maintenance work. Auth is perhaps underemphasised as an area for improvement. The built in auth isn't really fit for purpose anymore, and the various extensions for federation / passkeys take work to integrate and change a lot.

None of this is to write off Django or the people who've worked on it: I'm genuinely grateful for the framework. It's let me build open source things that help people out. The typical problems most of us standing up small-to-medium solutions need solved by a backend have just shifted underneath the framework, and it hasn't had the resourcing to keep up.

I've been looking at Pocketbase as a replacement. I think I'd prefer something that uses Postgres rather than sqlite, but it's pretty awesome as a solution for those two or three day projects, and the maintenance burden looks like it's pretty low on an ongoing basis.

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2. throwaway519 ◴[30 Mar 25 00:42 UTC] No.43520077[source]▶
Django dying the Drpal death of becoming a generalised case of nothing but itself?

Try Flask.

3. dplgk ◴[05 Apr 25 20:14 UTC] No.43596479[source]▶
What's become a pain about DB migrations? They've barely changed and they are still so amazingly useful that you forget it's something you have to think about until you move to another framework that doesn't have them.