Django

Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Originally developed at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison in 2003 and released as open source in 2005, Django was created to meet the tight deadlines of a newsroom, where web developers needed to build complex, database-driven websites quickly. Named after the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, the framework follows the model-template-views (MTV) architectural pattern (a variant of MVC) and emphasizes the DRY (Do Not Repeat Yourself) principle. Django is batteries-included: it ships with everything most web applications need out of the box, eliminating the need to assemble a patchwork of third-party libraries. Built-in components include: an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle with a powerful migration system, an automatic admin interface (the Django Admin, which introspects models and generates a fully functional CRUD interface with no code), a templating engine with template inheritance and custom tags and filters, a form handling library with automatic HTML generation, validation, and CSRF protection, a comprehensive authentication and authorization system (users, groups, permissions, and password hashing), a URL routing system with named URL patterns and reverse URL resolution, middleware for request and response processing, a caching framework supporting Memcached, Redis, and database backends, an internationalization and localization system (i18n and l10n), a security middleware stack (CSRF, XSS, SQL injection, clickjacking, and SSL/HTTPS redirect protection), a syndication framework (RSS and Atom feeds), and a test framework. Django is used by Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest, Mozilla, and Disqus. As of 2026, Django has over 82,000 stars.