The world of web development is a fast-paced one. There are so many new technologies and frameworks being released every day that it can be hard to keep up with them all.

Flask is a Python microframework that lets you build HTTP APIs and web applications. On the other hand, Django is an open source web framework written in Python. 

The framework makes it easy to build dynamic websites and web applications. In this blog post, we will compare Flask with Django ́s stack to understand the major differences.

Type of Framework

Django is a high-level web framework for Python which supports many useful features such as MVC, development with versions 2.0 and later are fully compatible to the 1.5 version of Django while being backwards compatible in releases below them (such as Django 2.1 or 3) with only minimal changes required to your codebase; another reason is that we don’t support multiple versions of AdminAPI – we currently use a single installer which includes both the Admin API v1.x and the new Admin API v2.0.

Flask is a lightweight framework for Python that provides micro-browsing, RESTful Web Services and caching via the Flask framework. Flask can be quickly extended to provide new features without changing the existing codebase.

Project Layout

Django is suitable for multiple page applications. A Django application primarily consists of models which expose a database connection. The main features three model classes:

Models create their content in template files and will display it for the user. Web pages contain templates, usually with loops to render different parts of the view data from each model into separate sections in HTML code (such as <p> or <div class=”section-header”></div>. So that part can be updated from a web server.

In Django, a project comprises primarily the following parts: Templates are located in the templates directory as a subfolder. They must be named “.html”. Templates have CSS style sheets to apply colour and font formatting rules (among other document elements). 

This is why: Django leaves you immense power over stylizing your pages. It allows you to define any part of an XHTML page like this with tags where ever you need: 

Therefore, Flask does not come with an in-built bootstrapping tool. It relies on the python package flask-bootstrap to consistently convert HTML templates into Python objects and vice versa.

The project layout is very similar in both applications however, only one file could be required within any page that uses templates. Not all web servers are compatible with Django. 

There exist many incompatible platforms where you need support for websites that use the Django project while running your application (i.e., nginx vs apache). Flask comes with two or more command-line options to correct the construction of the project:

Flask is very appropriate for development and testing configurations. Its speed rapidly grows as the app becomes scalable… Flask still remains one library that you can use in test servers.

Conversely, it has greater stability than Django because it works on just Python 2.7 and uses no C extensions like Django. however, it left-handedly assumes your code layout is like this.’

Django has features for quickly creating filesystem hosting or database backend. However, it does not have a built-in package available to deploy these types of applications on so-called Internet Servers (i.e., Apache 2 with mod_python/mod_wsgi and Passenger). 

Flask: Python web framework developers are accustomed to developing in Django.

Database Support

Django supports the most popular relational database management systems like MySQL, Oracle etc.. Web site publishing.

If a simple website is constructed, the user does not need to upload any data or edit files. Django then uses template tags on-page content based on database queries that know if specific fields have been added or edited and render them accordingly. 

An application-defined as raw SQL may be written to access features in one of these databases like an object-relational mapping (ORM). These applications are made in a database-agnostic way like HTML but make use of the schema available to any application.

Examples: Django’s admin interface uses SQL queries for displaying data from GIS and Mapserver data, while OpenStreetMap adds things like points (x), coordinates (y), user geocode translation services that let you output your address information into OSM using your GPS device-generated location or Google lookup. However, it is inferior, behind MySQLi and PostgreSQL.

With so many different databases, it is difficult to provide a general way of getting all this data when some other relationships are needed for particular tables.

Django uses ORM db-agnostic on the model level (pure python objects) but may use native references or custom wrappers depending on how you’re accessing your database, such as from Java/JavaScript etc. 

Flask doesn’t automatically detect the database type, and it can take a while to get things configured properly. For more information on creating hierarchical databases, please refer here.

Although this is considered an advanced feat, Flask cannot handle your relational data with ease because of its lack of support for objects that compose sequences like Python but exposes natively functions/methods which are easy in SQL as tables since they are special extensions(JDBC).

The easiest database-related program to use in Python is CPython’s sqlite, it includes all features necessary for a basic CRUD system, and its pure-python nature simplifies developers’ code (like RDBMS). There are other databases that rely on an external driver.sql package.

Speed

Django is more efficient than Rails because of its built-in caching layer and code reusability. In addition, a single Django application can be used in multiple frameworks, while a controller, view or template cannot be reused within another framework. 

The overheads incurred by switching backends to MySQL could also make most other frameworks inefficient. Django has the capabilities of modelling hierarchical data structures and relational databases. 

In particular, Django’s foreign key support for many-to-many relations enables some interesting DB modelling.

Through this method, you can construct a hierarchy where each model object may have non-hierarchical child objects without having to go through all other models that reference it; in addition, relationships between different tables can be recorded using foreign keys siblings as well.

In a technical sense, this technique is known as SQL injection. Still, it can also be called the” Database Shacks” effect because they are an abundance of data and lack any natural orders other than creation-date relationships where you end up with a lot more records just pulling in bigger parts of itself when querying one part instead than I would expect to find using fewer data.

On the other hand, Flask is a microframework based on Werkzeug that runs in the same JVM as Python itself.

While being very small and simple, Flask lacks some important features such as restart abilities built-in or a mechanism to implement an admin interface for your site accepting non-authenticated users; other than these two limitations. 

It offers an API similar to that of Django’s, allowing you to extend its module with new functionality quickly. In particular, the entity implementation is identical.

The main difference is that Flask lacks many of Django’s features, such as it being much more limited because it only has to handle requests on specific routes and not with the whole application, so there isn’t support for HTTP request dispatching (aside from a very simplistic one anyway).

As you can see, this makes working in Flask in some aspects easier since you understand which module does what without having to adhere to their documentation. In particular, it’s much easier to handle an admin GUI for your application since, being an HTTP-only app, all you have to do is combine the accept json and JSON Object modules that currently don’t work together.

One of Flask’s most important features is its ability to generate pages dynamically from templates (with Jinja2 library); however, to have flexibility with ease, at least one additional step must be taken: the temple.

Usage 

Django was created with a client-server model in mind. On the server-side, Django uses Python (a strict object-oriented programming language) to make decisions about what data is visible and which actions should be performed: 

It can be used with a relational database management system, such as PostgreSQL (database server) and MySQL or MariaDB. However, it is not well suited for OLTP systems like Oracle.

Other applications can manipulate third-party data sources (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) using Django via the django.db backend module that lets users interact with a separate database of their choice. 

The default settings output from “manage.py” are compatible with PyMySQL and SQLite:

They make use of caches to maintain the session state. Sessions include user identities across requests and will persist for at least twenty four hours between successive requests.

In addition to variables and actions, Django models have an additional set of properties. A simple comment can be fetched from a database like this:

Django 1 was the first release series, but it is not related to versions 2 or 3 in any way—even though they both need Django 1 for installation as all dependencies on Python2, including those listed above, plus newer ones such as PyXML are made available only within the version.

On the other hand, Flask is suitable for companies and projects that want to start with Python 2, Django has the advantage of a 1.9+ release series in which many libraries and packages are compatible, while Flask requires people to maintain two versions of CPython (2 and 3) on their servers.

Django is frequently compared to Ruby on Rails due to its similarity in goals, but differences are mainly found later as they grow old: “Two similar frameworks started out by focusing first heavily on making it easy to develop CRUD applications and moved to a more application-centric approach when they evolved their frameworks.”

Python is not constrained by language keywords or syntax limitations like Ruby’s makes Django easier for newcomers. The choice of which database can be used with Django —i.e. The integration framework—is open for options: MySQL, MariaDB or its self-hosted variant MongoDB (with PyMongo).

Conclusion

This blog post will explore how Flask and Django compare in terms of features, performance, and future development. We will also look at the benefits of each framework and which one would be a better fit for your company.

Author Bio:- Saurabh Sharma is a Digital Marketing Executive at Arka Softwares, a leading mobile app & web development company. He has 2 years of experience in the Information Technology industry. He spends his time reading about new trends in Digital Marketing and the latest app development technologies.