
Ask HN: React or Django? - apelin
Long Story short. 
Non technical co-founder here.<p>Working on getting an MVP asap. 
Hired a team to work on a react &#x2F; python app. They are suggesting to switch from React to Django for faster development since MVP is on a tight schedule.<p>What are the pros and cons of switching from React to Django?
Which do you recommend using for a fintech product?<p>Thanks in advance!
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midrus
If getting an MVP out of the door is the priority and the future of the
company/project depends on timing, then yes. Definitely. Forget about react
and go with django and the provided template system. Drop in turbolinks and
stimulus or unpoly and be done with it. Focus on the product. If it succeds
then you can always split the frontend and do it in React or whatever.

There is no way in this world building a backend + api + react spa is going to
be any faster than doing server side templates. Unless you're building the
next Google maps.

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mikece
While exact implementations depend on the site in question Django runs only on
the server and React runs only on the browser. Dropping React to only use
Django sounds like an airplane designer saying "let's skip adding the
propellers for the demo and only install the engines."

(Or is the team saying they only want to emit static HTML or JSON from the
server-side? Like I said the architect might be saying something I'm not
getting here -- or maybe you might have mis-heard or mis-remembered what was
said?)

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apelin
Thanks everyone for your input. I think I have a better understanding about
what's what here.

The dev team wanted to drop React as a frontend layer to save time on
development.

We decided to stick with React for frontend since there has been over 40 hours
spent on development on it. We'll try to save time by off-loading some
features and sign up flows until after the MVP is in public beta. Fingers
crossed...

~~~
bredren
You should listen to your dev team. Use bootstrap, jQuery and vanilla js to
get the product done.

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rwdim
React and Django are two different things.. the former is a client-side UI
framework, and the latter is a backend platform for handling requests,
accessing the database, etc. A better comparison is React and Vue. or Django
and Flask.

IMHO, Vue/Flask is a much lighter pairing to get an MVP up quickly, utilizing
SqlAlchemy or PeeWee as a database ORM library.

~~~
trenchgun
If the developers are familiar with Django, they can probably do the MVP just
fine with it - without any front end framework.

~~~
rwdim
Agreed.

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trenchgun
Django is a batteries included framework. If your developers are familiar with
it they can create a MVP fast with it for sure.

Then later (if there is need for that) you can separate the front end and the
backend, use django for backend and React or Vue for frontend for example.

But TBH there is not really enough context to know for sure.

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cameron_b
Those aren't one-for-one interoperable tools, what it seems they're saying is
to focus on the back-end for the MVP and leave some UI polish for later.
Django is a way of getting the Pythonic environment all the way up the stack,
so your Python devs can make the best use of their time.

