Python Django 3.0 Release: Will Help Developers Improve Applications in 2020

The programming language Python is famous for quite many reasons. It is loved by enterprises, developers, researchers all over the world. Be it enterprise development, machine learning or anything else, Python has more than a few applications in the present-day world. It has not just been able to impress users with its flexibility, ease of understanding, uncomplicated implementation and abundance of libraries, but also its frameworks that developers are falling in love with instantly.

People’s Favorite Python

Being open-source is Python’s greatest virtue and is also the reason behind such a big community of the language. Developers, researchers along with plenty of other people, contribute towards Python’s large scale popularity and python django development. It has indeed come a long way from the 1990s when Guido Van Rossum first created the language.

Since then it has evolved immensely both concerning issue fixes and language redesign, thus providing faster performance and flexibility to developers. Now that 2019 is coming to an end, taking a look back we realize that it was indeed Python’s year. The programming language made news for more than a few reasons. At the beginning of the year, Python was crowned as the most widely used programming language across the globe, beating JAVA and JavaScript. The IEEE yearly rankings for the top programming language stated that it was a classic win for Python also because of its widespread use in technologies like machine learning etc.

Django 3.0

Another reason why Python made headlines was that Python 2 is formally retiring at the end of this year. Guido Van Rossum made it quite clear in March this year, that the Python Software Foundation, core devs or Python.org would no longer be releasing any security updates for the language, not even source-intensive security updates. This left many organizations in the panic for migrating to Python 3 before the year ends. But amidst this chaos, the organizations who had migrated to Python 3 were happy about what was coming. It was the release of an all-new version of Django. There’s a new version of Django, 3.0 that is already making the buzz due to its issues fixes and some amazing features. Those familiar with the framework know that Django is a Python-based open-source web development framework for backend web applications. Ever since Django was launched in 2005, it has gained the attention of quite many people, including some of the top-rated organizations like NASA, Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest, and Mozilla among others. According to the recent Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey, Django earned the sixth position in the list of the topmost loved web-based frameworks. As many as 90,000 developers participated in the survey and 62.1 percent out of these voted for Django since they preferred it over any other web framework.

What’s New?

With Django 3 already becoming the developer’s favorite, let’s take a look at all the new features that come along with it.

It Supports MariaDB

MariDB is one of the most popular databases that was created by the original developers of MySQL. Django 3.0 supports versions 10.2 or higher of MariaDB. This database server is popular among developers since it is a drop-in replacement of SQL and helps turn data into structured information for a wide range of applications.

It taps into Python Async

Python Async allows programs especially the networking applications to run smoothly and efficiently. But the only problem with async is that applications must be rewritten to use it. With Django 3.0 working with Python 3.6 and later versions, it will be more than easier for developers to work with Python Asych’s programming features. The async capability in Django will be introduced by providing support for running Asynchronous Server Gateway (ASGI) application. Being an extension to the WSGI support, Django will provide a standard interface between Async capable Python web servers, applications, and frameworks.

Custom Enumerations for Field.choices

Custom enumerations are now available for Field.choices in Django 3. The new enumeration types include Text Choices, Integer Choices, and Choices. While text and Integer choices are provided for the respective fields, the Choices class allows defining a compatible enumeration for various other standard data types.

Simplified Expressions

Another great update in Django 3.0 is the express that output BooleanField. In the previous versions, these first had to be annotated and then filtered against the annotation. While in Django 3.0, they can be directly used in Query Set Filters.

PostgreSQL 9.5 and Higher

The latest version of Django supports PostgreSQL version 9.5 and higher. This new feature of the Exclusion Constraint class allows the addition of exclusion constraints on the PostgreSQL.

Other Features

Django 3.0 comes with a lot of features and deprecations as well.

• smart_text(), force_text() along with their aliases like smart_str() and force_srt() have been depricated in the new version.
• Python APIs that are no longer in use with Python 3 has been removed. These included private Python 2 compatibility APIs. Along with with these the support for pywatchman <1.2.0, sqlparse< 0.2.2 have also been removed.
• A lot of applications have been ended support from Django 3.0. These include Oracle 12.4, PostgreSQL 9.4, PostGIS 2.1, SpatiaLite 4.1 and 4.2, and GDAL 1.11 and GEOS 3.4
• The django.contrib.admin has transformed with added support for admin_order_field attributes that lie on properties in ModelAdmin.list_display
• The jQuery has been updated from version 3.3.1 to 3.4.1

Conclusion

Django continues to stay relevant in the world with its latest update. Just like any other language framework, it is undergoing the evolution process removing any outdated features and adding those which have the scope of development of future applications. The current release of Django, that is 3.0 only supports Python 3.6 and onwards. So, if you’re still stuck on Python 2, Django 3.0 is giving you yet another reason to amp up your app development by switching to Python 3.

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