Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.

In late 2015, following the Series G, Pinterest began migrating their web experience to React, primarily because they “found React rendered faster than our previous template engine, had fewer obstacles to iterating on features and had a large developer community.”

The legacy setup consistent of Django, Python and Jinja on the backend, with Nunjucks handling template rendering on the client side. They wanted to move to React for handling template rendering across the board, but if they “switched the client-side rendering engine from Nunjucks to React, [they’d] also have to switch [their] server-side rendering, so they could share the same template syntax.”

They decided on an iterative approach that consolidated a single template rendering engine between client and server, since “If the server could interpret JavaScript, and use Nunjucks to render templates and share our client-side code, we could then move forward with an iterative migration to React.” The team decided to stand up a Node process, behind Nginx, and interpret JavaScript server-side.

Now, when a user agent makes a request, a latent module render requests that it needs data via an API call. Concurrently, a separate network call is made “to a co-located Node process to render the template as far as it can go with the data that it has.”

Node then responds with rendered templates, and along with a “holes” array to indicate what data was still needed to complete the render. Finally, the Python webapp makes an API call to fetch the remaining data, and each module is sent back to Node as completely independent module requests/in parallel/.

With this framework in place, Pinterest developers are in the process of replacing Nunjucks code with React components throughout the codebase.

Since 2011 our frontend was in Django monolith. However, in 2016 we decide to separate #Frontend from Django for independent development and created the custom isomorphic app based on Node.js and React. Now we realized that not need all abilities of the server, and it is sufficient to generate a static site. Gatsby is suitable for our purposes. We can generate HTML from markdown and React views very simply. So, we are updating our frontend to Gatsby now, and maybe we will use Netlify for deployment soon. This will speed up the delivery of new features to production.

#StaticSiteGenerators #StaticWebHosting

Zulip has been powered by Django since the very early days of its development with Django 1.4, back in 2012. As a reasonably mature web application with significant scale, we're at the stage in many companies' development where one starts to rip out more and more of the web framework to optimize things or just make them work the way we want. (E.g. while I was at Dropbox in early 2016, we discovered we only had about 600 lines of code left from the original Pylons framework that actually ran).

One of the things that has been really fantastic about Django is that we're still happily using it for the vast majority of code in the project, and every time Django comes out with a new release, I read the changelog and get excited about several improvements that actually make my life better. While Django has made some design decisions that I don't agree with (e.g. I'm not a fan of Django REST framework, and think it makes life more difficult), Django also makes it easy to do your own thing, which we've done to great effect (see the linked article for details on our has_request_variables framework).

Overall I think we've gotten a ton of value out of Python and Django and would recommend it to anyone starting a new full-featured web application project today.

Django or NodeJS? Hi, I’m thinking about which software I should use for my web-app. What about Node.js or Django for the back-end? I want to create an online preparation course for the final school exams in my country. At the beginning for maths. The course should contain tutorials and a lot of exercises of different types. E.g. multiple choice, user text/number input and drawing tasks. The exercises should change (different levels) with the learning progress. Wrong questions should asked again with different numbers. I also want a score system and statistics. So far, I have got only limited web development skills. (some HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Wordpress). I don’t know JavaScript or Python.

Possible pros for Python / Django: - easy syntax, easier to learn for me as a beginner - fast development, earlier release - libraries for mathematical and scientific computation

Possible pros for JavaScript / Node.js: - great performance, better choice for real time applications: user should get the answer for a question quickly

Which software would you use in my case? Are my arguments for Python/NodeJS right? Which kind of database would you use?

Thank you for your answer!

Node.js JavaScript Django Python

I really love Django because it is really fast to create a web application from scratch and it has a lot a facilities like the ORM or the Admin module ! The Python language is really easy to read and powerful, that's why I prefer Django over Symfony.

I use Django at work to make tools for the technicians but I also use it for me to build my personal website which I host on PythonAnywhere, and with a domain name bought on Namecheap.

I've been using Django for quite a long time and in my opinion I would never switch from it. My company is currently using Django with REST framework and a part in GraphQL using Graphene. On the frontend we use Next.js and so far everything has been running quite good. I've found limitations but manage to solve it.

As someone mentioned before, if you are comfortable with Django, don't switch. There's no need since with django you can basically achieve anything. Of course this will depend on the project you want to build, but the scalability and flexibility django can offer it's just out of this world. (Don't want to sound like a fan boy haha but it really is).

Since you said that your middleware will be accessing DB and expose API, you can go with Node.js. It will make your development fast and easy. Suppose in future you will add some business logic you can choose Java with Spring Boot or Python with Flask / Django. NOTE: Language or framework doesn't matter. Choose based on your programming knowledge.

I would like to build a medium to large scale app, that has real-time operations and a good authentication system and a secure and fast API. Should I use Django with React only? Or maybe use Django for the API, Node.js for real-time operations and React for the frontend? Any suggestions? Which database should I use with those technologies? Should I use both MySQL / PostgreSQL and MongoDB together? Should I use only MongoDB or MySQL / PostgreSQL? Or is it better to go with both MySQL and PostgreSQL at the same time? Should I use also GraphQL?

Hello everyone,

Well, I want to build a large-scale project, but I do not know which ORDBMS to choose. The app should handle real-time operations, not chatting, but things like future scheduling or reminders. It should be also really secure, fast and easy to use. And last but not least, should I use them both. I mean PostgreSQL with Python / Django and MongoDB with Node.js? Or would it be better to use PostgreSQL with Node.js?

*The project is going to use React for the front-end and GraphQL is going to be used for the API.

Thank you all. Any answer or advice would be really helpful!