What is the current status of Django?

March 5, 2013 8:38 PM

Is Django still widely used by software developers?

I'm using Django for some work, and find it very useful in general. However, something I can't quite figure out is how popular it is. I know that there are a few high profile websites that use it, but it's not clear to me whether it is still a vibrant community or not.

Most of the developers I know, use PHP or Ruby, but I find Django (specifically GeoDjango) to be extremely useful for my work. When I go to read StackOverflow questions, or seek code examples online the total number seems much lower than I would expect. For example, I want to learn how to handle user authentication with 3rd party services. I've found a few libraries for doing this, but not a large number of examples using these libraries. I was not sure if I'm searching for the wrong terms of whether the community has always been quite small.

Hence my question - is the framework still living and healthy, or is it slowly dying off?

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth to computers & internet (9 answers total)

Django is the most popular and most widely used Python web framework.
While not as popular as PHP or Ruby, there are many big websites that use and support it -- Pinterest, Instagram, Disqus, for examples. Many start-ups use it and there is a large community supporting it (including DjangoCon and EuroDjangoCon conferences, including coverage at various PyCons around the world).

It is very healthy and is only becoming more popular.
posted by xtine at 8:49 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

I've read a lot about this on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com), which is where this question has been hashed to death. My scoring, as someone who is partial to Python but has never written a Django (or RoR) app, puts Ruby on Rails at 3/5 and Django at 2/5 market share. Actually a lot of that is based on the amount of outrage at all the Rails vulnerabilities lately... These threads will also tell you PHP is dead, but maybe that just means that no hot startup would ever hire someone to program in it.

You could probably wade through this search, or start here
posted by gensubuser at 8:53 PM on March 5

The Python community is very much larger than the Django community and also full of non-web applications. That's a key value proposition: the possibility you'll want to use libraries that simply don't exist in PHP or Ruby.

One way to evaluate the health of Django might be to compare the existence of job postings on indeed.com and dice.com relative to comparable other frameworks with easily searchable names. Here's a graph of job postings on indeed.com that compares Django with Rails, Zend, Code Igniter, Symfony, and Sinatra. Django comes out noticeably lower than Rails, comparable to Zend, and much higher than the others. On dice.com, the picture would be very similar: Rails has about 4x as many listings as Django or Zend, and the others have very modest numbers.

I'm not sure if you can make StackOverflow only show questions within a certain timeframe such that you can make similar apples-to-apples comparisons of what people have been asking about recently, but you can achieve something like that with a custom Google search. Limiting my Google search to the past month, I find "site:stackoverflow.com django" giving 588 results, and I find "site:stackoverflow.com rails" giving 582 results. You could attribute that to many things (e.g. maybe Rails devs go elsewhere, maybe Rails is easier, or maybe the job market hasn't caught up to reflect the number of things people are trying to do with Django now). But even if these factors are affecting the result, those are still pretty healthy numbers for Django.

A third way to evaluate the relative health of Django and Rails might be to look at the number of followers on Github: Django vs. Rails. Rails currently has 3x as many followers.

So Django's numbers are pretty healthy in comparison to the most well-known MVC framework in web development and seem better in the most tech-savvy locations than in the job market, where the job market may have a slight lag as people are more likely to seek specific skills for established projects.

TL;DR: you can use whatever language and framework you like; web application development remains a healthy field across the board, and pretty much any skill you're likely to acquire will be both marketable and transferable (none of these solutions are radically different or hard, relative to one another). But Django in particular is doing fine.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:22 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

Some famous ones would be Pinterest and Instagram (the links have descriptions of their tech stacks).
posted by Dansaman at 9:24 PM on March 5

Thank you all for the thoughtful and comprehensive answers. My reason for asking (in part) was mild concern that I am getting locked in to a technology that is declining; it sounds like that is not the case which puts my mind at ease.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 9:28 PM on March 5

I'm about to start on a six month project with a local dev shop to overhaul a Django based site that's supports a worldwide "thing" (the site is internationalized to over 20 countries). The overall project looks like a seven figure project, and there's never been talk of doing it any differently or migrating away from Django.

Likewise, the monthly Django meetups in my town are always well attended, full of people who are actually working with Django in their day jobs, which implies a strong technology. Development on Django itself is steady, professional, and very active. I don't think Django's ever been in better shape.

Second Monsieur Caution, adopting Python and Django has tremendous benefits for using technologies coming from other areas. From the area of scientific computing, for example, Python gets the incomparable iPython. Seriously, it's amazing, check it out. There's just nothing else like it, AFAIK.
posted by fatbird at 9:28 PM on March 5

Django's definitely active—there are 476 users in #django on freenode at the moment (midnight on the west coast).

The Django docs are famously useful and comprehensive, which might explain why there are fewer questions and code samples out there. I find myself reading the official documentation way more often than StackOverflow answers, which is more than I can say for most libraries.

(Also, check out Django Social Auth. There are couple examples in the repo.)
posted by ecmendenhall at 12:14 AM on March 6

Thank you all for the thoughtful and comprehensive answers. My reason for asking (in part) was mild concern that I am getting locked in to a technology that is declining; it sounds like that is not the case which puts my mind at ease.

It's definitely not in decline, though there are always new ways of doing things that may be better / smarter / more efficient / more scalable than what's gone before.

To address your reason for asking: working with one set of tools doesn't mean you're locked into that technology, provided that you keep up-to-date on other toolsets (for example, whilst working at my mostly Python job for the last few years I've also grown massively as a JS developer and am now learning Go - in fact the team I'm now managing uses it almost exclusively).

Don't think of languages or libraries as things into which you can get locked; think of them as tools in a toolbox. Carpenters don't worry about getting locked into using a particular type of sandpaper; as long as you keep abreast of other technologies you'll be fine.
posted by gmb at 3:58 AM on March 6

Django is totally healthy. GeoDjango is uniquely capable; if it solves your problems, by all means use it. Your skills will carry over to whatever the next hot new thing is.
posted by Nelson at 2:30 PM on March 6