Anyone using Django in the "Enterprise"

Question

I know that the word “enterprise” gives some people the creeps, but I am curious to know if anyone has experience creating enterprise applications, similar to something like say… Java EE applications, which are highly concurrent, distributed applications with Django? I know Java has its own issues but its kind of viewed as THE enterprise framework and I think that’s unfortunate.

Some people say that Rails is a good replacement for Java EE but what about Django? Has anyone ever used it in this context? You only ever see pretty standard websites on djangosites.org and it seems like its capable of so much more. I am planning on scrapping some of our old systems which are written mostly on ASP.NET and some Java for something more easily maintainable. I started using Django for some other applications and find it to be fantastic for what I am using it for (Corporate news, intranet, etc.) internally but what about something like… an accounts receivable system, or a billing system, etc. I would hate to see a framework such as this pigeon-holed into a category it doesn't need to be. It seems to be used for social media/networking, content-heavy sites, not so much data processing, etc. I feel that it has all the elements needed to start down this path. Anyone have any thoughts?

Answer 1

http://grono.net/ is a polish equivalent of Facebook and is used by a quite a few people (at some point it was a few million, now it's less, due to FB popularity). It works on distributed Django.

Answer 2

Is this what you're looking for?

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoSuccessStories

Or are you looking for this list? http://www.djangosites.org/

Here are Django powered sites in rating order: http://www.djangosites.org/highest-rated/

How about Django sites focused on "business": http://www.djangosites.org/tag/business/ is that "Enterprise" enough?

We do econometric data processing with Django. High volume transactions. Is that "enterprise" enough?

Answer 3

Yes, Django is used in the "enterprise world". The good description of pros, cons and the related development efforts can be found here:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/c89e028a536514d3

Answer 4

For the systems you want to replace, you may find that it is desirable to use something more powerful than Django's ORM like SQLAlchemy. It's not a question of scaling, but the fact is that Django's ORM makes it hard to build complex queries and often pushes you to do in Python what should be done by your RDBMS — when you don't have to resort to raw SQL. Although SQLAlchemy has a steeper learning curve, it has more features and is better suited to complex database operations. It's certainly worth your time to have a look at it before deciding on a web stack to build on.

This is probably less relevant to your questions but all the functionality in Django is also provided by other libraries that I find to be superior : Jinja2 for templating (it has the same syntax as Django templates without the mess that is the template tags system and better performance), WTForms for forms and modelforms, Babel for i18n (with many features not present in Django's own i18n library) and Werkzeug to provide a complete WSGI interface with URL routing.

Answer 5

My company uses Python/Django as a base for our Intramas Platform. An entreprise grade web application platform that is deployed to about a dozen large clients.

Built in features include central contact management, document generator, extra security layers, default GUI for rapid application design (no messing with Django admin interface!).

Overall we are very pleased with Django as a base for our development, it is very extensible and the release cycle produces solid code (we upgrade often).

While our site (http://www.sinax.be) is in Dutch and not very extensive at the moment you can always contact me for more information.