Django and NodeJs are two powerful technologies for web development, both have great functionality, versatile applications, and a great user interface. Both are open source and can be used for free. But which one fits your project best?

NodeJs is based on JavaScript, while Django is written in Python. These are two equally popular technologies with a large community of users and deciding to use one or the other is not always an easy task.

In this blog, we’ll help you better understand what each one of them offers and what makes the two different. So, let’s start!

Django

Django is a high-level web framework that uses the Python language to create applications. It makes it easier to develop applications with more quality and less code. By using this framework, you can concentrate on creating your application without having to worry about the developmental work. Additionally, it is a free and open-source framework used widely in medium/large projects.

When talking about back-end applications made with Python, Django is undoubtedly one of the most popular frameworks. As it is a framework that has a lot of acceptance in the market, it is widely used by companies, which consequently gives a good number of opportunities to work with Django.

Having an active community also becomes an incentive to learn Django. In this way, the framework keeps on evolving. Also, it means that there will always be more experienced programmers who can help the newbies. Django also has great documentation, which is essential for learning technology as virtually everything needed to learn is neatly concentrated in one place.

Django components are lightweight and have serialisation and validation systems used for converting between web page forms and database values. It also supports multilanguage support thanks to its built-in internationalization system present in its internal system. Moreover, Django supports the administration GUI, which is a kind of out-of-the-box interface for administrative tasks or activities.

Below is an example of Django code:

from django.db import models
 class people(models.Model):
     name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
     age = models.IntegerField()
     sex = models.CharField(max_length=10)
     phone = models.CharField(max_length=20)

Since Django uses Python, it’s important to remember that the scope of each block is defined by indentation.

Pros:

• The Django development environment is extremely well organised and one can learn good development practices. It provides a very good project structure that you can use. Django REST lets you construct API endpoints easily with the skills you have gained from learning Django.
• Django comes with an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) built-in. You write and design your database directly by writing it in python and Django ORM converts it to the database schema of your choice. Furthermore, ORMs eliminate the need to write SQL queries.
• Another nice feature of Django is that it comes with an admin panel. With this panel, you can easily maintain your databases, add, update and delete entries in your database.
• Security is one of Django’s great advantages. Django’s user authentication system provides secure management of accounts and passwords, helping developers to avoid mistakes. It has innate protection from more common attack vectors such as CSRF, XSS, and SQL injection.

Cons:

• Django offers limited flexibility because it has fixed development capabilities in few unsubstantiated or less pattern-based features, URL dispatchers, and internal subcomponent coupling.
• There is no way to effectively handle multiple requests simultaneously in Django. Each request involves a specific process, and it takes time to complete each request which makes the whole process time-consuming.
• Using it for small projects may not be efficient.

Node.js

Node.js is a technology used to execute JavaScript code outside the browser. With it, we can build web applications in general, from websites to APIs and microservices. This is possible thanks to the union of the JavaScript execution environment provided by Node.js itself and the JavaScript interpretation and execution engine present in Google Chrome, called V8.

Node.js is a single thread, background language that uses multiple threads to execute asynchronous code. Node.js is non-blocking, which means that all functions (callbacks) are delegated to the event loop and are performed by different threads. This is handled by the Node.js runtime.

An example of Node.js code for client creation is:

var http = require('http');
//
var options = {
  host: 'localhost',
   port: '8081',
   path: '/index.htm'
};
//
var callback = function(response){
//
var body = '';
   response.on('data', function(data) {
      body += data;
   });
response.on('end', function() {
//
console.log(body);
   });
}
//
var req = http.request(options, callback);
req.end();

Node.js supports the bifurcation of multiple processes (running on different cores). It is important to know that the state is not shared between the master and forked processes. We can pass messages to the forked process (which is a different script) and master the forked process with the send function.

It is a class for building asynchronous processing functions, allowing us to register callbacks that will be called after this processing. Understanding how promises work is essential since new JavaScript APIs are using this specification as the default for returning data.

Node.js is primarily used for non-blocking, event-driven servers due to its single-threaded nature. It is used for traditional websites and backend API services but is designed with real-time push-based architectures.

Node.js is increasingly becoming an essential technology for many companies around the world. Because Node.js emphasises concurrency, speed, and intensive data exchange, and employs push technology on web sockets, it has helped companies build various apps, such as social media apps, video chat engines and text, real-time tracking apps, online apps, gaming, and collaboration tools.

Pros

• Very fluent, you don’t have to worry about changing languages when writing code for both client and server.
• JSON, your JS objects are JSON, if you’re writing web APIs – it’s JSON and MongoDB. MongoDB allows you to store and retrieve JSON documents. This is a very important factor for me when developing web APIs for my mobile apps.
• A dynamically typed language such as JS offers flexibility and advantages over a strongly typed language such as Python in some situations. One such situation is creating applications for the Node.js platform.
• It’s fast. JS code is compiled into native code by Chrome’s V8 runtime. I find a lot of misleading information on blogs and YouTube videos that Node.js is slow because it uses JavaScript. Don’t fall for this misinformation.
• The node package manager makes it easy to install node modules.
• It’s very easy to deploy. Deploying Node.js apps on Heroku and Nodejitsu saves a lot of time.

Cons

• Node.js relies heavily on callbacks and you won’t be surprised to write nested callbacks 5 or 6 levels deep. You can avoid this by using named functions or futures and promises.
• The learning curve is higher.

How to choose between Django and Node.Js?

When putting Django and NodeJs side by side, we need to keep in mind that deciding to use Django or Node.js is deciding for Python and JS, and all the advantages this choice represents.

Now let’s see the basic and technical differences!

Differences between Node.js and Django

First, we need to understand that what does it mean to compare Django to Node.js.

Python is a (server-side) language and Django is a server-side environment. Node.js is a server-side framework. However, it is crucial to understand that Node.js is a runtime environment. It is an environment that allows you to develop code on the server using javascript.

To do anything useful with Node. js besides “hello world”; you will need to use a framework and there are tons of those around and various groups have been developed by the community to tie all the components together. An example of such a stack is MEAN, which is MongoDB for the database, Express for the framework, Angular to help with the front-end, and Node to run it all.

Django is a framework, it is not runtime. This means it is one step removed from the Node. The runtime for Django is Python. Django is also not a “stack” like MEAN, you can develop your own stack on top of it, but since Django is a “battery included” you really need to add the database – it includes everything else you need.

It is important to understand that frameworks are not separate languages. They impose specific constraints, conventions, and workflows on you with the benefits of development speed and best practices. To give you an analogy, language is like giving you bricks and mortar and telling you to build a house; the framework gives you pre-built rooms, chimneys, floor plans, and more. It relieves certain boredom in building a house but also limits you to whatever design they choose for you. It is much more difficult to build a house with bricks and mortar, but the benefit is that you can build anything you can imagine if you are experienced enough.

Django was created by a team working for several newspapers to help them manage the content published on different sites. Thus, it is designed in such a way that content management is of utmost importance. This is why it has a very robust administration console as a standard component; and a built-in pretty solid ORM and custom templating engine. Django leaves that for you to figure out how best to get it up and running; although they provide many suggestions and examples, in the end, it is up to you to decide which database to use, which webserver to use, and how to deploy the application.

In the Node.js world, the focus is on non-blocking I / O and response speed. Node.js excels in that it can serve many concurrent requests for limited resources. Therefore, it provides you with a very powerful framework for developing applications that need to respond quickly to requests and what it is. When you program in Node.js or any other specialised low-level library, you need to make sure that your code makes full use of the library. So, if you start writing locking code in Node.js, you will find that the expected performance has not been achieved.

How Differently Django and Node.js Function

Django is a server-side solution for building dynamic websites and web applications. The main goal of a server-side Django solution is to provide server-side rendering, where all the logic and all templates for creating rendered pages in HTML reside on the server. This is why these solutions can be entirely in Python because JavaScript – the browser language – is not needed.

In a Django application, the user makes requests to the Django server, and that server figures out everything that should happen in response to the request, including getting any necessary data from the database and composing/setting that data to HTML pages (HTML rendering) using templates. The server then simply sends the finished web page to the browser to replace the current page.

In contrast, React (Node.js) embraces a more modern approach called a Single Page Application (SPA). With this approach, much of the logic and all of the HTML rendering templates are exposed in a JavaScript application running in a browser. After initially loading everything the browser needs and loading the initial HTML page, the browser application will never ask for a replacement page, but rather provide the entire user interface which looks like changing the “pages” from its own logic using HTML templates which it has already downloaded and will only make XHR / AJAX requests to the server for the raw data in JSON form. This is client-side rendering, which is very important for mobile devices, as full-page movement from the server can be very slow on mobile devices. SPA takes over because it feels much more responsive to the mobile user.

There is a lot more to understand, but this is the foundation. This means that your main choice is between a traditional server-side application displayed on the server, and a more modern client front-end SPA, supported only by data services (usually a REST API) from the server.

Node.js is great for many reasons in a SPA context, not least because it means programming a “full-stack” (client and server applications) in the same language, JavaScript but you can also create a server of this kind in Django or using any useful language for building http servers. The only point is that if you are using Django you will not take advantage of templating and server-side rendering, but simply use it for the static server (to load the file content) and the data server.

Final Considerations

Both Node.js and Django are fast, very powerful web technologies. You can create almost anything with them, but you need to know that the tool is designed for the best results in order to know when to use it. Also, Nodejs and Django are not mutually exclusive. You can use both in your application and use your strengths and use what each does best.