One thing that I’ve found to reduce boilerplate is being able to throw exceptions from helper methods and have those be converted to responses. For instance, I often want to see if an object exists, and if not, return a 404.

This is easy (and obvious) in Django - I can just create a middleware class and override the exception handling method. In Play it’s also easy, but it took a while to figure out where to put the logic. I think that I was looking for something as comprehensive as Django’s middleware - something that handles requests, responses, and exceptions, but that doesn’t exist in Play - those are all scattered around. To do something equivalent, you’d have to create a mixture of filters, actions, and creating your own ErrorHandler.

Looking at the exception handling alone, I find Django’s system to be much nicer out of the box. In Django, there is a list of middleware classes...

I’m testing some API endpoints in a Django app using two different databases. One of them is a read-only legacy SQL Server database (another topic in itself) with multiple schemas, while another is Postgres and stores things like authentication and sessions. Django isn’t great with SQL Server to begin with, but having it be unmanaged made things slightly trickier. Here is how I was able to get things working.

OK, this is a sample class:

class Foo(models.Model):
    id = models.PositiveIntegerField(
        primary_key=True, 
        db_column='FooId')
    bar = models.CharField(
        max_length=256, 
        db_column='BarEntr')

    class Meta:
        managed = False
        db_table = 'UNREADABLEENTERPRISENAME'

This is a pretty standard Django model. The differences are

• You have to define the database columns that the model attributes are mapping to (the db_column argument)
• ...