Back to Django EN

A research group was using Microsoft Access for their databases and was thinking about their options.

I gave them some suggestions in italian, this is a rough translation of them, as they might be relevant also for others.

I came back to Django, which I had already used in mupris.net, and I concluded that it was the best solution for them.

Django is not necessarily the best tool for experts, and indeed it is not what I choose for NOMAD. There are several options, for example Sqlalchemy is an excellent python tool to handle relational databases, Active Records is what would be used with ruby on rails (which I did in another project, and is a bit the inspiration for Django approach), Jooq is an excellet optio with java or JVM languages like scala. I used all of these options, and there are even more.

Still there are other aspects that are relevant for a choice:

• possibility of involving field experts which are not computer science experts,
• how much those persons can rely on good programmers and how much they should be able to work independently.
• how much the tool pushes you toward well tested solutions (maybe not the best, but things that worked well in practice)

Here I think that django, with its support for migrations and the admin interface, helping one not to be kept hostage of the Database, beats other options.

See the full discussion in italian for more details.