Django vs Flask vs FastAPI – A Comparative Guide to Python Web Frameworks
There are many frameworks used in web application development, each of them has their own advantages and limitations. To develop a Python-based web application, there are three very commonly used frameworks: Django, Flask, and FastAPI. Here in the article, we will discuss these three frameworks used for developing python based web applications. In addition to understanding these frameworks, we will also try to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we will do a comparative analysis of these frameworks according to several important parameters. The following main points that we will cover in this article.
Contents
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- Django and its advantages and disadvantages
- Bottle and its advantages and disadvantages
- FastAPI and its advantages and disadvantages
- Comparison of Django vs Flask vs FastAPI
Let’s start by discussing the Django framework.
Django
Django is a python-based web framework that is free and open source. The architecture model it follows is the model-model-views architecture model. It was created by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison in 2003. Nowadays, it is one of the most popular frameworks in the world due to its robust behavior.
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One of Django’s main goals is to make it easier to develop complex, database-driven websites. It is used by some of the giant websites like Instagram, Mozilla, Nextdoor, and clubhouse. The reasons for being famous are less code, low coupling and low reusability, and the ability to plug-in components during development. In addition, these features contribute to rapid development.
Advantages of Django
- Although it has its own nomenclature, it generates the HTTP responses and the core of the framework can also be thought of as the MVC (model-view-controller) architecture. Where architecture is commonly used to develop user interfaces made up of three main components. The basic structure and components of the MVC architecture are shown in the following image.
When the model manages application data, the view renders the model user interface, and the controller controls the input and interaction between the user and the model.
- The framework consists of ORM (object-relational mapping), relational database, web template system, and URL dispatchers. Where the ORM links between models, HTTP requests handled by the relational database and. The URL dispatcher is the regular expression-based controller.
- The contib package of the Django framework is used to bundle a number of applications. We can allow thyroid part code in a running project using Django’s configuration system. It follows the convention of reusable applications.
- In the framework we have more than 2500 packages with the solution of the problem on which it does not work. This can be useful to extend the behavior of the framework.
- The framework automatically activates security against most typical web attacks such as cross-site request forgery, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, password cracking. In addition, it can be considered as a tool for generating Google sitemaps and GIS applications.
- Django provides the rest framework with powerful API features. The rest framework has a built-in browser API for testing endpoints, and Django with the rest framework provides authentication and authorization rules with the framework.
Disadvantages of Django
- Django frameworks have no conventions. Often times when configuring “on the go”, the components do not match. Since everything has to be well defined in the process, this leads to a slower development speed.
- Sometimes Django is not suitable for small projects with little functionality because the functionality of the framework can confuse the developer.
- A very small number of framework dependencies makes Django monolithic in which development should be seen as a single package. The lower number of dependencies allows development to be completed with a large amount of code.
- Django offers a lot of features and configurations, which is why it cannot be learned quickly by the user.
- The demand for each individual process slows down the Django development process.
Ball
Flask is a web framework developed in python. flask is microframework because it doesn’t need a library or special tools for web development. Common functionality provided by pre-existing third-party libraries.
With the help of flask, we can build web applications with python programming language. The main goal of this framework is to develop lightweight applications with inferior functionality in an easy and fast way. Flask is based on werkzeug, jinja, MarkupSafe, ItsDangerous. All of which are part of the pallet projects.
Advantages of the bottle
- We can change most parts of the bottle safely and easily due to its simplicity and minimalism.
- We can create multiple applications or servers using modular vial codes that can be distributed over the large network, each with specific tasks. This makes the applications more efficient and more efficient.
- With a better understanding of python, it becomes easy to develop flask applications.
- The application developed by Flask is more scalable than the monolithic application. Because according to new methods, the application runs in containers with autoscaling. Monolith applications do not adapt on their own.
Disadvantages of the bottle
- The vial is not standardized in most organizations. Knowing any framework we get using flask doesn’t help in other frameworks like Django. It therefore sometimes becomes difficult to switch from one bottle to another framework.
- Fewer tools make a developer develop more things on their own or we have to research a lot of libraries and extensions to complete the deployment.
- Most of the time, application networks have a single source which has to process the requests one after the other, independent of several requests at a time, which makes the application take longer.
Fast API
FastAPI is a modern, fast, and robust framework that helps build APIs with python 3.6+ versions. It is considered to be one of the fastest Python frameworks. It’s a framework that is quick to code with fewer developer-induced bugs. The main objective of the FastAPI is, in
- Rapid development
- Fewer bugs
- High and fast performance.
Companies like Netflix and Uber use this framework which fully supports asynchronous programming and can work with WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) and ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface). FastAPI is a crucial building block that brings Starlet, Pydantic, OpenAPI, and JSON Schema together.
Benefits of FastAPI
- FastAPI helps validate developer’s data type even in nested JSON requests.
- It offers the autocomplete feature which helps in producing applications with less effort and less debugging time.
- It is based and also compatible with OpenAPI (An Open API is a publicly accessible application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service), JSON Schema (JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents).
- FastAPI makes it easy to build a GraphQL API with a Python library called graphene-python.
- FastAPI integrates well with OAuth 2.0 and external providers.
Disadvantages of FastAPI
- FastAPI is a relatively new framework, so the directive community is small. We have less external educational information like books, courses or tutorials.
- Since in app development we have to tie everything together in FastAPI app which makes the main file very long or cluttered.
Comparison of Django vs Flask vs FastAPI
As we saw earlier in the article, each framework has its own advantages and disadvantages, let’s compare them according to the following parameters:
- Packages: As we have seen, Django has over 2,500 packages in its library that can be considered the full-stack web development framework. Flask is a microframework, and FastAPI also has sub-Django packages.
- Community: Since there are a variety of uses for the Django framework, it was released earlier than flask and FastAPI, so it has the largest community among all of these frameworks. We have a lot of tutorials for the Django framework, after which we have a lot of tutorials for Flask. Since FastAPI is a modern framework, it contains little external information.
- Performance: Since FastAPI mainly focuses on high performance, we can say that it is the fastest framework among them all, Flask is also a high performance API due to its micro-framework function and offers superior performance. to those of Django.
- Flexibility: When developing an app, every developer focuses on making the framework flexible so that they can change parts of the app in the future if other updates require changes. In the case of flexibility, the flask supports changes in almost all parts of the applications, so we can say here that it is the most flexible
Final words
Through this article, we have discovered the three most famous python-based web frameworks in the world. They all have something better in themselves, like if we need high performance in the application, we can choose the FastAPI, or if flexible, nothing is more flexible than Flask among all these frameworks. When we talk about Django, we can use this framework as a full-stack development framework because it provides various features which can be very useful for developing a large number of features in an application due to its robust behavior.
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