On: Django Newbie Mistakes

[scrollaway]

Forms are a nightmare to work with. It's a component in Django I systematically avoid, even when using actual forms.

Nowadays I use DRF for everything though. Serializers > Forms. And React > Templates.

As for the ORM, I long for a world where the ORM is replaceable by SQLAlchemy. Django's ORM is nice and simple, but as soon as you want typed complex queries, SQLAlchemy is really good.

[blorenz → scrollaway]

Agreed. Django Forms' hay-day was back in the Request/Response rendering of page state era of the web. They introduced the ability to bind data for validation, rendering in the Template, programmatic generation based on Model and sanitization of form input data. They still can be utilized loosey-goosey on the backend in the world of APIs. Why bother when better tooling now exists? The use-case of Forms now is the Admin side of the house where they can facilitate the CRUD of the Models.

[Rjevski → blorenz]

Just wondering, what do you use instead of Forms for non-Javascript websites?

[scrollaway → Rjevski]

For what it's worth you can still use DRF serializers instead of forms on non-JS sites. DRF can take multipart/form-data

[collyw → scrollaway]

Personally I find Django's forms easier to work with, but maybe that's because i have spent more time with them.