I've been developing a site to be able to curate sports media using Django, and that's going reasonably well, but my friend that I'm working with has some of our required functionality (some information display, page-level stuff) going with PHP. Is there an easy way to integrate those, like maybe running the php through the Django templates, or should we try and convert some the functions to one language or the other?
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2 Answers
In such cases, I think, it makes sense to make some kind of internal interface through which your sites would communicate, and expose only one of them to public. That would make everything more maintainable.
For example, your friend can make his PHP pages to output information in JSON or YAML. In corresponding Django views, you'll have little to no logic, just making internal HTTP requests to these pages, and basically passing the data to templates.
This way, you'll have output via Django templates, and some logic still in PHP. If PHP code does some work with database or performs computation that can't be converted easily enough to Python, and you have limited time, this option may be the best.
Though, I guess, it depends a lot on the architecture of the project, especially the PHP part. There's not enough information to say what's the best option for you.
Comments
Don't mix languages if you have any other option. Honestly, I don't think the type of integration you're imagining is even possible. About the closest you would ever get would be two separate websites that shared a common look and feel and passed info back and forth to each other. At the end of the day, though, there would always be a separation of management and data.
There's some pretty robust PHP frameworks out there. Assuming your friend is using one of those, you'll need to decide which best fits with the time and skills you both have to devote to the project. If your friend is not using a framework, the decision is simple: move everything over to Django.
2 Comments
cfrederich
would it be viable to use django as the visual framework and php just for more intimate scripting jobs, or something to that effect? And would that be scaleable for a large number of users later?
Chris Pratt
Potentially, but even then, python scripts might be more appropriate, as you can still tie into parts of the Django infrastructure (management commands, etc.) with a python script.