turbo-django VS django-webpack-loader

Indicative of how marvelously stable Django is that none of these roadmap items have to do with the software.

I came back to the old workhorse for some experimentation recently and was delighted, delighted (!), I tell you, at how familiar, comfortable, and productive it was.

Started exploring a Turbolinks/Turboframes implementation (https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django) that Just Worked. Amusingly, mid-hack, the repo owner marked it as unmaintained.

But it works! Nothing needs doing! Another victim of the cult of constant improvement.

Yes Turbo is created by the team behind Ruby on Rails and it's an evolution of Turbolinks with bunch of other functionality added. But Turbo can be adapted to other languages and backend frameworks (and already has!). This Turbo thing is not Rails specific.

If you would like to try something different, there is this new thing called hotwired: https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django Basically, it's about generating HTML on the backend and pushing it to the frontend. thru WebSockets. It's not production-ready yet (for Django at least) so it's more like a fun fact for now.

Django Webpack Loader

Check out https://github.com/django-webpack/django-webpack-loader

About one month ago i started having a lot of doubts on my frontend. At first, instead of decoupling frontend from backend, i decided to use a library called django-webpack-loader that lets me serve webpack from Django templates, so i created a Vue app and served it from Django (i used a simple index.html view). So at this point i basically have a SPA that instead of being decoupled from Django, it's served by Django.

You can do this with Django and nothing else easily or you can use a third party library called Django-Webpack-Loader.

In addition to what's already been said (completely separate frontend & backend; or do a CDN include), I've worked in a codebase that uses django-webpack-loader.

The biggest challenge to using Django with React IMO is getting the right blend of isomorphic rendering down. I don't want to go full SPA with Django as this defeats the purpose of Django IMO. Most parts of the site I want server-rendered, while in stateful parts I want React. So, let's say I have a site with 20 different React "apps" (i.e. stateful components) that I want to distribute amongst my various Django sections (Django "Apps" within the same project). And I want to do that with one webpackconfig. How do I tell my webpack where to put all those react bundles? The answer I've found is django-webpack-loader[1], however as you can see in the Issues section, one of the biggest limitations here is the inability to chunk React (and other issues).

Does anyone have a solution they like for this kind of isomporphic Django problem?

1. https://github.com/owais/django-webpack-loader