Table of Content
This piece was prepared in collaboration with Mateusz Piekarek, Profil Software’s Fullstack Developer. Thank you for your expertise :)
Introduction
Python is both one of the most recognized and the most popular programming languages thanks to its simplicity, efficiency and robust frameworks that speed up web development. Python offers many frameworks and they all provide developers with a set of benefits as you can learn from one of our older articles on the subject of choosing the Python framework for a Startup. Are you wondering whether to use Flask, Falcon, Fastapi or Django for your SaaS startup project? Or perhaps some other framework entirely? We know it’s not an easy decision. Your project’s success may rely on it, especially if you need to to get the production-ready app in the shortest amount of time possible to not burn any funds.
With years of experience in various industries, including Energy management software development, govtech, healthcare and wealthtech software development, and over 100 successfully delivered projects, Profil Software’s teams are well versed in fast and proficient web and mobile app development. Our main focus always lies on the project and not only in terms of finishing it on time, but also in ensuring that it meets the business goals and user needs and thus succeeds in the extremely competitive market. How do we go about it? We’ll share with you the gist of it in this article, but that’s not all.
To bring the ins and outs of web development a little closer to you and ensure that you make an informed decision about the language and framework used for your project, we’ll give you an idea on what you can expect when developing an app with Django. Why Django? Because even with new technologies emerging every year and with tools and frameworks evolving so rapidly, Django still remains one of the best choices for web development.
What is Django?
Django is a high level Python framework that can be used for both small and large projects thanks to its versatility, stability and rich ecosystem. That’s why it stands out among other Python frameworks. Django inspires the creation of a maintainable reusable code and follows Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle to clear out any unnecessary duplications and reduce the amount of code. In line with Batteries included approach, Django comes with all the parts required for its usability. Everything you need is a part of a product, which makes using Django easier and translates into quicker development. An extensive and up to date documentation, as well as the fact that Django follows consistent design principles is also part of the reason why Django is so popular. It’s widely used by many big players among numerous industries.
Major Platforms Built on Django
Django offers many advantages that no other language does, which is why there are numerous successful platforms built on it. Why out of so many frameworks big companies that work with different kinds of applications turn to Django Software Development? Because they want a quick, scalable and dynamic website that will be able to handle millions of visitors. Let’s see what applications are created using Django and how that helped them achieve their greatness.
One of the biggest platforms for sharing photos and videos, Instagram, was initially developed using Django, which enabled it to manage a higher number of user interactions per second and analyze huge amounts of data easily. Thanks to Django’s ready-to-implement solution the team behind instagram could focus on developing UI/UX instead of wasting more time on backend technology. Instagram handles massive scalability and real-time user interactions that go up to 95 million photographs and around 4,2 billion likes daily. Instagram started out as a simple photo sharing platform, but it is now a place where users can find content on various subjects, from photography and art, through lifestyle and health, to travelling, languages, pop culture and many more.
Instagram is hardly the only social media platform built using Django. Another one is Pinterest, a site that manages millions of images and searches daily as well. Pinterest has 250 million users monthly and thanks to Django it can easily manage a high volume of visitors. Django is not only responsible for the excellent performance of the site, allowing great scalability, but it also ensures smooth processes that include features such as following users and sharing boards and pins across numerous accounts.
Spotify
Spotify, a platform for listening to music, creating and sharing playlists and browsing through a large database of genres and artists, utilizes Python to also handle big amounts of data. It particularly uses Python for its backend and analysis purposes, ensuring seamless performance and something Spotify is known for: its speed. The added benefit of it was also the speed of the development. Spotify heavily relies on Python, utilising not only Django, but also its other frameworks, modules and libraries, such as Twisted, Luigi and gevent. Spotify’s backend consists of many interdependent services and around 80% of them are written in Python. Spotify uses async frameworks for services that are IO bound and Luigi, among other things and along with a range of machine learning algorithms, to power the Radio and Discover features and recommendations.
Dropbox
Dropbox, a file hosting service that allows its users to store and share documents, videos and other files, uses Django for secure file storage, synchronization and its sharing feature. Dropbox has utilized Python extensively since its inception. The company’s CEO, Drew Houston, wrote the initial lines of code in Python and in January 2013, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, joined Dropbox as well. He contributed significantly to the company’s engineering efforts. Just like in other instances, Python helped speed up the development process, enabling the team to construct the server and desktop client software quicker than any other language could.
The Washington Post
A content-driven web app for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper publisher, The Washington Post, is built on Django. It helps handle the site’s heavy traffic by providing fast and efficient performance. More than that, because of Django’s ability to scale quickly and flexibly, some of the busiest sites on the net turned to this framework. As of today The Washington Post is one of many newspapers running on Django. Other examples include The Guardian, The Onion and (partially) The New York Times.
Mozilla
Mozilla is one of the most recognizable browsers in the world and even though it was initially built using Php and CakePHP, the platform had to look for other solutions as the number of users grew significantly. Python isn’t the only language used for it, however all the new components are written in Django. Thanks to Django the platform is now more capable of handling hundreds of millions of page views per month and many more APIs requests per day. It powers the whole Mozilla support site and add-ons, bringing increased efficiency and speed to the platform.
NASA
When you’re building The website of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) some of the elements that you need to focus on are reliability and security. Django has effective protections against a number of common threats, including XSS and CSRF attacks. Its security is of great value for government sites that are prone to be a target of security attacks. NASA utilizes Django for several sites, including Center for Cross-Discipline Collaboration platform, which upports collaborative websites for NASA researchers and their partners and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Django makes it easier to efficiently handle complex datasets and user interactions, ensure a robust and secure environment for scientific collaboration and control the extensive and dynamic content requirements.
These are only a few examples. In reality, Python and Django are used by many companies, both big and small, for their websites and apps for various purposes. If we wanted to mention all of them, we’ll have to create an entire series of articles dedicated to businesses using Django. To name just a few more: National Geographic, Prezi, Udemy, Reddit, Quora, Bitbucket and many, many more. However, when researching which big sites are built using Python or/and Django one has to be careful, because there is a lot of misinformation. Sites cites Facebook or Google Search Engine as big companies using Django, but there is no real data to back that statement. We had our Developer fact check the information in this article to not include those mistakes and to let you know which websites are actually using Python and/or utilizing Django.
Django’s popularity is not an accident. Over the years it has proven to be one of the most reliable and efficient frameworks available for web development. Some of the reasons for Django’s recognition were already mentioned above, such as its scalability, security and speed of development. In this next part of the article we’ll dive into details on what makes Django an ideal choice for huge successful platforms known worldwide.
Why Django is the Best Choice in most cases: Key Advantages
As we saw in the previous part of this article: from startups to tech giants, companies rely on Django to build scalable, secure, and high-performing applications. But what exactly makes Django stand out?
1. Security
Security is one of the most important aspects of the online development world, and Django excels at it. Django’s built-in defenses against typical threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protect applications from online threats. Additionally, Developers can easily manage users and permissions with Django’s authentication system, which reduces the number of vulnerabilities. This is the main reason why Django is chosen by numerous government agencies and well-known enterprises like NASA.
2. Scalability
What is a small project today may become a popular social network or a large online store in the future, and Django is one of the most popular and convenient frameworks that can be easily scaled up for such needs. Thanks to its modular architecture and efficient request handling, Django powered apps are capable of handling millions of users with ease. Whether it is a photo or video sharing social network like Instagram or an e-learning marketplace like Udemy, Django helps to maintain the stability of web applications even under extreme traffic spikes.
3. Rapid Development
Speed is critical in today’s market. As already mentioned above, Django follows the “batteries included” approach. This means that it provides all the features that a developer needs to build a production ready app without having to look for them elsewhere. Some of the built-in features include a default administration panel, authentication system and the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) which reduces the time of development and gets the product to the market very fast. This is especially important for start-ups that have limited time and resources and yet they want to develop a quality product and launch it to the market as soon as possible.
4. Maintainability
The well-being of any software project in the long term rests on writing code that is functional but also maintainable. Django encourages reusable and modular coding practices through its enforcement of the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Because of that, it is far simpler to update, add features, or fix issues as your application grows. Instead of working with legacy code that is difficult to navigate, developers can concentrate on coming up with new ideas for innovation.
5. Versatility
Django is not restricted to a particular type of web application, which makes it an exceptional fit for SaaS, eCommerce, FinTech, Healthcare, and even huge content-centric platforms like news sites. From building sophisticated FinTech applications to AI-based recommendation engines to online shopping platforms, Django’s versatility allows it to cater to various business models and requirements.
6. ORM and Database Flexibility
One of Django’s standout features is its powerful ORM, which simplifies database management. Instead of writing complex SQL queries, developers can interact with the database using Python code, making development more efficient and readable. Django also supports multiple databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite, allowing seamless migrations and scalability. This level of database flexibility means that applications can evolve without major backend overhauls.
7. Large and Active Community
When choosing a framework, community support is just as important as technical capabilities. Django boasts a massive, active community of developers who continuously improve the framework and provide extensive documentation. This means that whether you’re a seasoned developer or a beginner, you’ll find resources, tutorials, and third-party packages to help you along the way. Plus, since Django has been around for nearly two decades and is backed by an established ecosystem, its longevity is guaranteed.
How Profil Software Uses Django to Deliver Successful Projects
Profil Software has been building applications using Django for over 15 years now. We’ve successfully developed web and mobile software from the ideation stage to the completion, providing maintenance and feature updates after the implementation as well. Django’s versatility allowed us to implement innovative solutions with its help across various industries, including Govtech, Healthcare, Transport & Logistics, Fintech, Hospitality, Edtech and Energy Management Software. Thanks to Django’s unique features our applications are easily scalable, secure and resilient. Our software for various industries can handle large databases, document analysis, huge amounts of users and requests. We offer an array of custom features, all delivered fast and with no complications. Thanks to Django we can avoid many challenges that applications built using other languages deal with.
For us Django means time and cost efficiency. It allows our clients to ship their MVP as quickly as possible and keep the highest quality of the application at the same time. With so many years of utilising Django, we know how to make the best of what this language has to offer. You can read more about our use cases in our Case Studies on Shareholder Management Software, Route Planning and Optimization Software, Aviation Software and more.
Conclusion
As you can see, Django has many strengths that can be utilized in various ways and projects. It not only speeds up the development process, enabling faster time-to-market but also ensures scalability, security, and maintainability, making it a reliable choice for both startups and enterprise-level applications. Even those applications who didn’t start off as Django-built software, often turn to Django when their audience grows in numbers for its ability to handle high traffic effortlessly.
Our article shows that no matter what industry you’re planning to develop your app for, it’s wise to at least consider utilizing Django’s strengths to maximise your app’s performance and ensure that it’s running smoothly. The tech world changes rapidly with new tools, frameworks and modules emerging every day, but Django still remains one of the top choices for web development. It makes bringing an app to the market time and cost efficient but also provides the long-term stability and flexibility needed to adapt to evolving business needs and technological advancements. Its extensive ecosystem, strong community support, and well-structured design principles ensure that applications built with Django can grow, scale, and remain maintainable for years to come.