Cakti Comment on Django's Class-based Views

After PyCon 2015, we were surprised when we realized how many Cakti who attended had all been asked about Django's class-based views (CBVs). We talked about why this might be, and this is a summary of what we came up with.

Lead Front-End Developer Calvin Spealman has noticed that there are many more tutorials on how to use CBVs than on how to decide whether to use them.

Astro Code School Lead Instructor Caleb Smith reminded us that while "less code" is sometimes given as an advantage of using CBVs, it really depends on what you're doing. Each case is different.

I pointed out that there seem to be some common misconceptions about CBVs.

Misconception: Functional views are deprecated and we're all supposed to be writing class-based views now.

Fact: Functional views are fully supported and not going anywhere. In many cases, they're a good choice.

Misconception: CBVs means using the generic class-based views that Django provides.

Fact: You can use as much or as little of Django's generic views as you like, and still be using class-based views. I like Vanilla Views as a simpler, easier to understand alternative to Django's generic views that still gives all the advantages of class-based views.

So, when to use class-based views? We decided the most common reason is if you want to reuse code across views. This is common, for example, when building APIs.

Caktus Technical Director Mark Lavin has a simple answer: "I default to writing functions and refactor to classes when needed writing Python. That doesn't change just because it's a Django view."

On the other hand, Developer Rebecca Muraya and I tend to just start with CBVs, since if the view will ever need to be refactored that will be a lot easier if it was split up into smaller bits from the beginning. And so many views fall into the standard patterns of Browse, Read, Edit, Add, and Delete that you can often implement them very quickly by taking advantage of a library of common CBVs. But I'll fall back to Mark's system of starting with a functional view when I'm building something that has pretty unique behavior.