I'm using Starlette on it's own, with a few other deps likes Marshmallow, and it's been enjoyable and hassle-free. In the past I've done significant django/flask/DRF work and really feel like Starlette is the successor of all of them.

I'm under the impression there's only a handful of people who use Starlette/FastAPI AND have a proper experience with DRF. I'm on a similar boat, I have experience with Django/Flask/DRF and was thinking about starting a project with Starlette (I used it before and I prefer it over FastAPI) but I've decided to continue my DRF journey. Would you mind sharing why, in your opinion, Starlette might be the successor of DRF?

I would say my favorite things about Starlette are:

- refined - it feels like all the lessons from DRF were put into Starlette.

- lightweight - minimal dependencies, isn't built specifically for relational data (no orm or other constructs from django that were originally built around models etc)

- flexible - has just enough to build the basics without being too opinionated (app/request/response), let's you choose how to handle things like serialization (e.g. add marshmallow)

- documentation - like DRF, has very solid documentation.

- asgi - the successor to wsgi in many ways, allows things like background tasks so I don't need to set up celery.

- authentication/middleware - easy to set up and customize, again clear documentation and api surface

There's probably more, such as it support for websockets, push, and more, but for me I'm just running a standard http api (sqwok.im).

Thanks for your response. I guess that's the point, I prefer more opinionated framework with it's own ORM. And I can't say I'm a fan of async.

I'd say Starlette will be the successor of Flask.

totally, if you'd like to hear more about it feel free to reach out.. I'm happy with the pattern I'm using and it feels pretty extensible.

> The biggest productivity impact is not switching frameworks

Totally agree but I'm 2/3 days in with 500 loc - it's worth rebooting if there's something seriously good out there!

Okay, that’s totally valid lol