Research passing data between Django and React

[antidipyramid]

Background

From Sam's team survey.

What will be the focus of your R&D? Why do you think it's important? Leave background here.

Proposal

What shape do you want your R&D to take? Focus on the big picture: What tasks you want to accomplish, what questions you want to answer.

Deliverables

What artifacts will you produce from your R&D? How will we know when you're done?

Timeline

How long do you expect this R&D to take? What could cause you to need more or less time?

[hancush]

Re-reading Sam's memo, the main frustration seems to be that responsibility for certain tasks, like building forms, is spread across the stack. For that reason, I propose a clear and clean separation where React's only role is rendering interactive components – maps, charts, forms, etc. – while Django retains responsibility for everything else.

More explicitly, Django is responsible for...

• Database
• Models
• Routing
• Views / templates
  • Back end form processing through Django's forms module
• Data API (Django REST), if needed
• CMS

React is limited to...

• Interactive components
  • Interact with API and/or static data files baked out in ETL process
  • Front end form display and user interaction

An interesting question: Why keep routing in Django?

In the short term, the answer is because our CMS of choice, Wagtail, uses Django routing (and myriad other pieces of Django, like template tags, serializers, etc.), and we don’t want to split responsibility across the stack.

With that said, Wagtail comes with a Django REST Framework API and can be run headlessly. We could utilize that and delegate routing to React. This is a bigger step, however. It involves writing custom Python code to correctly serialize CMS-managed content, and we'd have to adopt a React-in-browser framework like Next.js (#378). See details, plus example code bases, here: https://wagtail.org/headless/

With that said (again), I think (?) we like writing Python/Django more than JavaScript, and we abandoned Gatsby because we didn't like the DX of a JavaScript web framework... so there's that.

[hancush]

Reading this now: https://github.com/HackSoftware/Django-Styleguide