I use Django to do all kinds of "non-traditional" stuff (key-based API authentication, automatic object-level caching, custom form fields, using Postgres features such as UUID fields and fulltext search) and none of it took me that much work. But then, I've been using Django for a few years now and know the ins and outs quite well.
I can see how you'd be enticed by a simpler framework such as webapp2 or Flask as a starting point. But I've found that Django is as flexible if you just consider that most of the built-in features that Django provides (even the awesome ORM) are optional if you know what apps and middleware to disable.
> if you know what apps and middleware to disable.
And when I was learning Django, I didn't know this. I moved to webapp2 because I could put only what I wanted in an application. I'm sure that if I sat down and re-dedicated myself to learning Django like I'm doing with Rails, I might have a better time at it the second go-around.
Yes, I know. It took me a long time to understand Django the way I do today. A great starting point was James Bennett's 'How Django processes a request' blogpost [1]. From there you'll see how Django is just a tiny wrapper calling a bunch of increasingly complex applications that build on top of each other.
There should probably be a chapter on the tutorial with a simplified version of that. It'd help newcomers understand where everything fits.
In any case, I'm glad you found a tool that does what you need as long as it isn't written in PHP :P
Django provides a set of tools and a unique methodology for creating apps. Overall, you end up writing less code in a djnago app in order to do more, for that reason, it requires greater understanding of the framework.
For simpler frameworks, they require less understanding but greater amount of code, which may end up being more complicated.
I, personally, used to do it all by myself as a PHP developer, where I wrote raw sql queries and handled the raw HTTP request. Once I figured out ORM in django and its custom templating system, everything becomes so much less code and easy to implement.
Where did you get stumped with Django?
I use Django to do all kinds of "non-traditional" stuff (key-based API authentication, automatic object-level caching, custom form fields, using Postgres features such as UUID fields and fulltext search) and none of it took me that much work. But then, I've been using Django for a few years now and know the ins and outs quite well.
I can see how you'd be enticed by a simpler framework such as webapp2 or Flask as a starting point. But I've found that Django is as flexible if you just consider that most of the built-in features that Django provides (even the awesome ORM) are optional if you know what apps and middleware to disable.