When comparing Django vs ActFramework, the Slant community recommends Django for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Django is ranked 6th while ActFramework is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Django is:
Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Developing a simple prototype can be very fast
Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly.
Pro ORM support out of the box
Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model
.
Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API.
Pro Top notch documentation and help from community
The official Django documentation is probably some of the best around. Well written, thorough and they explain every little detail of the framework. Django is also a very popular tool, with an extensive community and a lot of experienced developers that have been using it for years. This means that there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there for new and experienced developers alike.
Pro Highly customizable
Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out.
Pro Has an admin panel out of the box
Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy.
Pro Mature software with many plugins developed over the years
Django was first released in 2005, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins.
Pro Clear and defined MVC organization
Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors.
Pro Simple database management
Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command.
This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application.
Pro Performance
There are two aspects of performance: how quick a developer can deliver a feature and how fast the app is running on the product server. Act is designed to deliver excellent results in both aspects. With unbeatable developing experience, Act makes it very easy to release a feature; on the other side Act is very fast in runtime. Check out this 3rd party benchmark result.
Pro Hot reload
You never restart while you're working on your Act application. Act's hot reload feature is fast and stable, it makes you feel like dealing with scripting language frameworks like Django or NodeJs. Watch this video and feel it.
Pro Scalability
Act is built as a stateless framework. It supports horizontal scale.
Pro Secure
Act is built as a secure product. It provides built-in CSRF/XSS prevention mechanism. And act-aaa makes it very easy to implement Authentication/Authorization/Auditing in your app.
Pro Superb RESTful support
Act makes creating RESTful service a kids game. It features AdaptiveRecord (allows front end to drive the data structure), JSON response control (just declare the fields you want to present or hide) and RESTful URL routing with path variables.
Pro Easy to deploy
ActFramework is not a servlet framework and there are no requirements on containers/app servers. It has a small package size (a helloworld distribution package size is less than 20 MB), a small memory feet print (a helloworld app heap usage is less than 20MB) and a fast boot up speed (a helloworld app starts in less than 3s).
Pro Templating
Act's view architecture is very flexible and support using multiple view engines in your app. The default template engine is Rythm, a very developer friendly and powerful template engine. Act also support other templating solutions including freemarker, velocity, thymeleaf, and mustache via plugins.
Pro Configuration for multiple environments
Act supports load configuration from a common dir and then overwriting it from a profile dir. Makes it very easy to manage configurations in different environments (e.g., dev, uat, sit, prod) Watch this video to see the innovative way Act delivers its configuration support.
Pro Concise and expressive
Act does not require you to put Annotation when it is able to infer the intention from other parts of the code, i.e., you don't use @PathVariable
or @RequestParam
to tell Act the binding parameter name. And you don't need a ModelMap
to bind variables to render argument names. Act has sophisticated byte class scanner to detect the variable names to do bindings automatically.
Pro Comply to standards
Act's IoC is built on top of Genie, a fast dependency injection library that fully supports JSR330, and Act's validation solution is built on top of JSR303. Act is NOT an odd framework to most Java developers. Unlike Play1.x, ACT applications follow the standard maven project structure and it is very easy to integrate other Java libraries.
Pro Database access
Act's DB layer is extremely easy to use. It supports SQL databases (through ebean orm) and MongoDB (through morphia). Using multiple datasource can never be that easy with Act's DB layer. Go here for more information on this.
Pro Fast and flexible routing
You can configure your routing in either Spring MVC/Jersey style with annotation or Play style with route table or a combination of both. Act's routing supports RESTful URL path variables, optionally validated with regular expressions.
Cons
Con Can feel bloated for small projects
Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. It has too many bells and whistles which can get in the way when developing a small scale application.
Con The documentation does not cover real-world scenarios
It is a larger documentation indeed, however is not deep and covers non real problems or even don't show any examples. You'll be better with Google or Stackoverflow
Con Routing requires some knowledge of regular expressions
Given a GET request for /topics/426/viewpoints/1/sections/create
, how does Django decide which bit of Python code is invoked to handle it?
It compares the request path to your giant pile of regular expressions.
And then if there's some other regular expression starts matching /top
and all your requests for /topics/
start going there, good luck figuring out why. You won't be informed of any conflict until you notice you seem to be getting the wrong pages back.
The structure of URL paths is almost universally hierarchal. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing.
Con Template errors fail silently by default
If you make a typo in a template variable, or change a view so that variable is no longer passed to the template, you won't get an error message pointing out that something has gone wrong. That reference will just be treated as if it is an empty string instead.
There is a way to configure this, but since so many templates have been written assuming this behavior, nobody ever enables template errors because it would break so much of the existing support tools (e.g. the built-in admin interface).
Con Incomplete microservice support
Although Act is built to be a great framework that supports microservice development, it lacks some of the key features at the moment, like sending requests to other microservices from within the app, service governance, and messaging handling.
Con Very small community
As of February 2017, Act is a brand new framework (even though the project started at the end of 2014). Community is still forming.
Con Functional testing support still under development
Developers are still working on innovative functional testing support for Act.
Con Documentation is still being written
Act's documentation is still under development.