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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Since F# is typed, have a look at FastApi in Python. It's a better inspiration than flask: it uses dep injection with typing to configure your endpoints. It's very flexible, infinity composable, and such a nice experience.

Django's API is now clearly dated. I still use it massively though, because it's insanely productive for CRUD apps, which are 99% of my client requests.

They made some hard choices about the auth and db layer, and they are imperfect, but when left to do the choice myself in other frameworks, I often miss Django. You really value all it gives you once you've lost it.

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Thank you for mentioning FastAPI. Looks awesome. Recently I started using Flask, as Django feels like too much overhead for smaller projects. FastAPI looks like a good alternative to Flask.

> Django feels like too much overhead for smaller projects

It depends. My advice is always: stick to django no matter what, unless you are a seasoned web devs. I've seen too many flask projects with terrible architecture decisions and security holes because flask assumes (by nature) you can take those decisions.

Those decisions are not easy to take. They require a deep knowledge of the field.

So yes, one may chose flask or fast api as a lighter alternative, provided they know very well what they are doing, or that the consequences of not knowing are small. The later is not always simple to evaluate however, especially if you are not experienced. You don't know what you don't know after all.

If somebody doesn't know if they are an experienced web dev, or the consequences of their choices, they should use Django.

It will save them from SQL injection, XSS, Cross request forgery and click hijacking. It will provide an pluggable auth backend should you need it later. It will force you to put some parts of your code in separate sillows. This is a good thing for most people.

Frankly if you go with the most popular extensions: Flask-SQLAlchemy, Flask-Login and Flask-Admin you will have more or less all the features of Django with a nicer API, better documentation and more flexibility

I've been using all of them, and no, not at all. Flask-admin is a far cry from the django admin. It's also buggy sometimes.

Flask-SQLalchemy is not well integrated at all. E.G: try to play with it in the shell, the session management is annoying as hell.

As of flak-login, it doesn't have a tenth of the

Also you forgot: csrf handling, i18n, xss, click hijacking, cache backends, and so on. That's again, more plugins you have to select.

And that's a lot to configure, learn doc, then upgrade when the times come, on top of that.

All of them will, obviously, not be compatible with SQLA 2 next year, because the projects are not a whole, so it's going to be even more fun on the months to come.

I really think a beginner should not use that.

This is a good summary. Sometimes I too forget how much stuff Django provides out of the box for free. But now it is an old and boring tech, apparently. Oh well.

agree it depends, and I haven't looked at Django for years - so can't comment on it.

However, I have been using FastAPI with Jinja2 & htmx to create web APIs and UIs for some of our services. Individually, they're great; collectively they're a joy. I'm no front end dev, but even I can put together functional, decent-looking apps in a few hundred lines of code. They bare comparison to angular apps that can easily be an order of magnitude more code.

I just wanted to mention that I considered FastApi but the amount of reflection and magic required to go this route was a bit too much to my liking in F#. Just a personal preference.

I mostly agree with you on Django though. But as you said - most apps are CRUD apps.

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