Django vs. Laravel: A Beginners Guide

Diving into the Back End

Beginners delving into backend development are faced with many choices. In the past, options were less but getting a backend server running was a hectic task. In modern-day programming, setting a backend server for a web application takes about 2-10 minutes at most.

Most frameworks are being constantly developed to give beginners an easy time to start using and get acquainted. This article will analyze the two frameworks, and a verdict will be delivered on what beginners should choose.

The most crucial difference for these frameworks that a beginner should know is that they have different architectures to run on the web. Let’s take a look:

• Django has a Model View Template (MVT), while Laravel has a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture.
• The MVT architecture has views that receive HTTP requests then return responses. This architecture is primarily easy for beginners as they have to configure controllers and route them to their respective views.
• MVC uses a controller that manages both the view and the model. In the MVT, the views are separate from the models and come together in different events such as POST, PUT, DELETE, or GET methods.
• MCV architecture, the controller manages the views shown in the browser and can be directly linked to the model when the need arises. This creates a more fluid way of managing files since views can be arranged according to their controller. For instance, having a StudentController would make it easy to register, log in, edit, and delete student records in one file. Django views typically have all code within the views.py file unless the developer makes the program modular manually. Laravel has commands that can separately generate and automatically create functions for rendering the views to all the request methods.

Enough Jargon

With all these said, let us step out of the jargon and talk about things beginners like hearing. "Is it easy to pick up?"

• Django is a straightforward option to pick up and offers a backend customized according to the users' needs. This immediately pushes many people who are confused to move into Django, considering the other many backend options that do not offer a ready-made administrator panel.
• As appealing as this may be, Laravel has some nifty tricks up its sleeves. Laravel runs on a browser native language (PHP), which offers a wide variety of built-in methods within the language to carry out everyday browser tasks.
• Django is not browser native and might need manual configurations at many different levels.
• The Laravel framework supports internal compatibility with frontend frameworks such as Reactjs and Vuejs, making it an easy step for a frontend developer to use this framework.
• Apart from this, Laravel is also compatible with Tailwind CSS and its very own native Ajax-like framework, Livewire. I have used this framework at a production scale and can testify that it saves a ton of time compared to setting up Ajax itself.

Why Choose Django?

Django puts this aside and relies on its REST API capability. Files for the frontend and backend need to be separated in a Django application if the developer uses a JavaScript frontend framework. They can be put in one place, but this dramatically limits scalability.

So What Should you Use?

• The final verdict lies within the beginner's love or understanding of a programming language. However, Laravel provides more flexibility and more long-term benefits when building a backend that will need a user-intensive frontend.
• Beginner developers who want to focus on developing API-intensive applications; Django is the go-to. This is not said because Django has high flexibility in API development, but it is quick and easy to build simple APIs on Django.
• While Django has a package for API development, Laravel comes with out-of-the-box functionality to create APIs. With these said, Laravel beats Django in many aspects because it is web development native.