Flask vs. Django: Choose the Right Framework for Job.

Flask vs. Django - Choose the Right Framework for Job

Python is an excellent choice for web development - frameworks such as Flask and Django, powerful builds, efficient web applications become much easier.

The focus of this article, what are the differences between Flask and Django?

Why Do We Need Flask or Django?

Before we start comparing this duo, we need to actually understand the big picture: why do web designers need a framework at all? 

With front-end JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue being the hottest technologies on the market right now, it’s critical to understand why developers pour so much time and resources into creating such technologies.

The power of structures is in many cases - explained in detail. Before we do that, however, let’s reiterate one important thing: frameworks aren’t designed to “simplify” everything. 

Creating a basic web page with JavaScript is much easier than using React; each framework has a learning curve - but the benefits they provide are totally worth the effort.

Standardization: Almost every programming problem has a number of various solutions to it — and sometimes developers cannot agree on the best practice. Frameworks address this conundrum by basically telling the developer: 

Scalability: Enforced standardization allows us to scale web apps with ease because developers have a clear system to follow.

Integration: Another benefit associated with configuration is the ability to easily connect other services and tools; A good example is how easily information can be integrated into a business concept of a framework.

Finally, making it easy to improve is another great reason to read a web framework. Localization process (e.g. you live on your machine).

The Python code on the web includes a lot of manual steps followed by program presenters, and experienced program programmers simply find them discouraged.

Web frameworks remove most of this "discouraging thing" from automation. When it comes to web frameworks, Flask and Django offer other benefits related to HTTP functionality, web security terms, and the like.

This means that the creation of a large web app absolutely requires a framework. Here’s the million-dollar question: which one to use?

Even though it’s tempting to compare these technologies directly (e.g. “Framework A is better than Framework B!”), — So there is no “better” framework out of the two, only a framework that fits your own needs. Both Flask and Django are a good choice when it comes to web development. The tricky part is understanding the differences between them, so let’s try and see how they compare in areas like security, speed, performance, popularity, and some others.

General Focus & Philosophy

First, we have to look at the focus and philosophy of both the Django and Flask frameworks - that is, the goals their development teams had in mind when designing these frameworks.

Django is probably best known for its “embedded batteries”, which means it is preloaded with a number of useful tools that the builder can choose from.

This includes things like a web server, a template program, a caching framework, and many others.

Django boasts the following design philosophies:

Loose coupling: Features of different structures should not be too dependent on each other, unless absolutely necessary.

Less code: Boilerplate should be minimized and "Zen of Python" (Pythonic coding guidelines) should be followed.

Quick development: Frameworks’ standardization facilitates quick development (Django’s motto, after all, reads: for perfectionists with deadlines).

Explicit is better than implicit: This approach discourages the use of “magic code” (i.e. code that works even though nobody understands why); instead, readability should trump magic code and clever tricks that condense whole functions into one-liners.


On the other hand, Flask chooses a different approach: it is designed to be as lightweight as possible, providing only basic functionality. Should the developer wish to extend the functionality of a Flask app, they’d have to rely on third-party tools and extensions (as we’ll find out later, this approach can pose certain security issues).

Flask is often referred to as "microframework", Because of its small size (and a small set of features compared to Django), as the name suggests, offers only limited functionality.

For example, working with this framework does not provide features such as ORM, access control, or external box authentication.

Flask, among other things, is a great example of Pythonic code (ie following the best Python methods) - you can check out its source code here.

Popularity

While popularity is not a determining factor, we still want to know how Flask and Django compare to this.

JetBrains, the team behind Psycharm, a popular Python IDE, provides this data in their annual Python Developers Survey. To sum it up:


Do you know them all?

Django and Flask dominate the Python Web Framework market. Fang fans can use this data to gain dominance over Django, and here's another important point: these two frameworks are (almost) identical in popularity, so they are unlikely to share the same functionality. This reinforces the point we made earlier: You need to remember that there are many differences in these settings.

Conclusion

All things considered, it's easy to see why both Flask and Django dominate the Python Web Framework market - their excellent functionality is enough to create a high-performance website. Still, there's not really much competition between them: Flask's attention and use cases are very different from those in Django.