Can Django be used for non web apps?

Question

I noticed in the main Django introductin they show a feature that maps python objects to the database. This doesn't strike me as being mutually exclusive with with development, is there any reason why this can't be used for non web apps? Is it easy to separate out?

Answer 1

The part you're mentioning is the ORM and yes, ORMs are useful besides web development. In theory you could use the Django ORM for non-web stuff. However this can be a bit complicated because it is not released separately so you'd have to extract the code yourself (or you have to include the whole django package).

There are a lot of other ORMs in Python that you can use standalone way easier. My favorite is SQLAlchemy (http://www.sqlalchemy.org/), but there are others like storm and SQLObject.