[Arbortheus]

Django is still great.

I recently upgraded two ~10 year old aging legacy applications at work. One was in Flask, and one in Django. This made me appreciate the "batteries included" philosophy of Django a lot more.

Even though the django legacy application was much larger, it had barely any extensions to "vanilla django". Comparably, the flask application had a dozen third-party flask-* dependencies that provided functionality like auth, permissions, and other features that Django has built-in. Many of these dependencies were archived/abandonware and hadn't been maintained in a decade.

When it came to upgrading the Django app, I had one giant release notes page to read. I didn't need to switch any packages, just make some pretty simple code changes for clearly documented deprecations. For the Flask app I had to read dozens of release notes pages, migrate to new maintained packages, and rework several untested features (see: legacy application).

In my mind, "batteries included" is an underrated philosophy of Djangoo. Also, it is now such a mature ecosystem it is unlikely there will be any radical breaking changes.

Perhaps there are some parallels to draw with newer trendy (but minimalistic) python frameworks like FastAPI.

If I were building a web application I wanted to last a decade or more, Django would be up there in tech choices - boring and sensible, but effective.