Hacker News Reader

Comment by robohamburger | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Also, unless django has changed peaking under the hood is a nightmare. Forms and the ORM (and really the whole framework) is giant ball of mud.

View on HN

Forms are a nightmare to work with. It's a component in Django I systematically avoid, even when using actual forms.

Nowadays I use DRF for everything though. Serializers > Forms. And React > Templates.

As for the ORM, I long for a world where the ORM is replaceable by SQLAlchemy. Django's ORM is nice and simple, but as soon as you want typed complex queries, SQLAlchemy is really good.

Agreed. Django Forms' hay-day was back in the Request/Response rendering of page state era of the web. They introduced the ability to bind data for validation, rendering in the Template, programmatic generation based on Model and sanitization of form input data. They still can be utilized loosey-goosey on the backend in the world of APIs. Why bother when better tooling now exists? The use-case of Forms now is the Admin side of the house where they can facilitate the CRUD of the Models.

Just wondering, what do you use instead of Forms for non-Javascript websites?

For what it's worth you can still use DRF serializers instead of forms on non-JS sites. DRF can take multipart/form-data

Personally I find Django's forms easier to work with, but maybe that's because i have spent more time with them.

Yep, forms smell of Java Struts. I was so happy to say goodbye to them when I started using Rails in 2006. Another Javism, templatetags, because they don't want we write Python in the templates. So every small customization takes x100 the time in the best tradition of early 2000 Java frameworks.

It's not changed much. Some things are a bit better (model's Meta is now documented and not considered "private") but largely I have grown to enjoy the benefits of picking the right tools (SQLAlchemy, Jinja2) and luckily Django is doing a lot better at making things pluggable and you can use Jinja2 as a first class citizen now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com