— by Abhishek Maurya
A framework is a pre-defined structure that helps in developing and maintaining a common structure of the application with relative ease. Every programming language has its own framework which helps building an application in that language. A framework helps in reducing the development time drastically and also helps in minimizing code errors and logic errors.
In this article, we will be comparing and contrasting two Rapid Application Development (RAD) frameworks — Django and Spring Boot.
Django is a Python-based framework and Spring Boot is a Java-based framework.
Django
Django is an open source, high-level web framework that is used to build web applications that are implemented using Python. It is a light weight framework that provides the skeleton with mostly used functionalities in-built to instantly create an application or a website. Most of its use is related to MVC monolithic programming, the ORM, migration capabilities, and its support for modules. Below is a sample structure of a Django project. Creating a proper project structure and organizing it helps in keeping the project DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and clean, and encourages re-use of the modules.
History
Django was designed and developed by Lawrence journal world in 2003 and publicly released under the BSD license in July 2005. Since then, DSF (Django Software Foundation) has been maintaining its development and release cycle. The current stable version is 2.2.5, which was released on April 1, 2019.
Features of Django
Rapid Development
The purpose of designing Django was to create a web application framework that enables faster development. Although the project implementation phase is usually time-consuming, Django is capable of building web applications rapidly.
Secure
Django places a strong emphasis on security and assists developers in preventing common security errors, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and others.
Scalable
Django possesses inherent scalability and can efficiently adapt from small to large scale projects in a flexible and timely manner.
Open Source
Django is a web application framework that is open-source and freely available to the public. Its source code can be obtained from the public repository at no cost.
Versatile
Django’s versatility enables it to develop applications for diverse domains. Currently, companies utilize Django to create various types of applications.
Popularity
Small and medium-sized companies frequently utilize Django, as do prominent companies like Instagram, Mozilla, Disqus, Pinterest, Bitbucket, and others. Furthermore, Django benefits from a vast supportive community and numerous channels for sharing and connecting.
Spring boot
Spring boot is an opinionated starter pack for web development on top of the spring framework. It is termed as opinionated, as Spring assumes what you need and why you need it before you even click run.
Spring Boot with web runs an embedded tomcat server with spring dependencies and some core software patterns (configuration, stereotypes, application context, IOC, bean management, and dependency injection). Boot lets you import the pieces you care about from other spring or not spring dependencies.
Spring is a monster. A HUGE monster, with corners of dark past, dungeons of experimental projects, and hallways of abandoned ideas. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of prod-ready functionality that can be used to instantly create system of services. It covers so many areas that it is really hard to cover it’s breadth in brief. Here’s a sample of the folder structure of Springboot.
History
Spring Boot came into existence when in October 2012, a client, Mike Youngstrom made a Jira request asking for bootstrapping the spring framework so that it can be quickly started. And hence in early 2013, Spring Boot was made. In April 2014, Spring Boot 1.0 was created followed by various versions.
Features of Spring Boot
Testing:
Spring Boot provides a comprehensive testing framework that includes tools for unit, integration, and end-to-end testing of Spring Boot applications.
JSON:
Spring Boot provides support for building and consuming JSON-based RESTful web services using Jackson, Gson, or any other JSON processor of your choice.
Validation:
Spring Boot provides a powerful and flexible validation framework that allows you to easily validate user input and other data in your application.
Task Execution and Scheduling:
Spring Boot provides a task execution and scheduling framework that allows you to easily schedule and execute tasks, such as batch jobs, on a regular basis.
Spring-Application:
Spring Boot provides a convenient way to bootstrap and configure a Spring application, with sensible defaults and auto-configuration based on the classpath.
Lazy Initialization:
Spring Boot supports lazy initialization of beans, which can improve startup time and reduce memory consumption by only instantiating beans when they are needed.
Admin Features:
Spring Boot provides a variety of tools and features for managing and monitoring your application at runtime, including metrics, health checks, and an admin dashboard.
Security:
Spring Boot provides a powerful and extensible security framework that allows you to easily secure your application with authentication, authorization, and other security features.
Logging:
Spring Boot provides built-in support for logging using Logback, Log4j2, or Java Util Logging, with easy configuration and customization options.
Kotlin Support:
Spring Boot provides first-class support for the Kotlin programming language, with auto-configuration, type-safe builders, and other Kotlin-specific features.
Caching:
Spring Boot provides caching support out-of-the-box, with built-in support for popular caching frameworks like Ehcache, Hazelcast, and Redis.
Architecture
- Since Spring boot uses all the features/modules of spring like Spring data, Spring MVC, etc. so the architecture is almost the same as Spring MVC, except for the fact that there is no need for DAO and DAOImpl classes in Spring boot.
- Creating a data access layer needs just a repository class instead, which is like implementing CRUD operation containing class.
- A client makes the HTTPS request(PUT/GET) to the service
- The request goes to the controller and the controller mapped with that route as that of request handles it, and calls the service logic if required.
- Business logic is performed in the service layer which might perform the logic using the data from the database which is mapped through JPA with model/entity class.
Popularity
Spring boot framework is basically used for all types of applications. It can be used for monolithic and microservices-based applications both. It is mostly used by large and scalable projects. Google, Accenture, Microsoft, and Amazon are some companies that use Spring Boot.
Community
Spring Boot has a very large community available on GitHub, StackOverflow, and also the spring boot community page.
Conclusion
Both frameworks have their short features that help you to develop the application. If we talk about the learning curve, Django is easy to start, and if you have very less time to build an application, so you can choose Django. Before working on Django you need to learn Python, it is also easy to learn. But if you want to build a large and scalable application in this situation, you have to go with Spring boot.
Originally published at https://www.zipy.ai.
