To tie-in with the upcoming elections for Django's Steering Council, I wanted to think again about Django's Core, let's call it Batteries Included Revisited.
Django will be 20 years old next birthday 🎂 — I don’t think I’m really going out on much of a limb to say it got an awful lot right.
“The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” — If I had to call out things that are the cornerstone of that, I’d probably point to the request-response cycle, the ORM (of course), and ecosystem of third-party packages, of which DRF stands out as the package that was simply essential for so long.
Likely, if I asked you Why Django?, you’d point to similar things. Maybe we’d quibble on details. You’d emphasise one thing, I another. But likely the tone would be, ”Oh, yeah, that too”, rather than disagreement per se. The answer is always some variation on, it lets me do my job.
But it wasn’t always clear that Django was going to make it to where we are today. There are plenty of good projects out there that don’t make it into maturity. Django is not the only way you can solve the web problem quickly.