Django vs Spring Boot: Building E-Commerce APIs in Python and Java

Django vs Spring Boot: Building E-Commerce APIs in Python and Java

I built e-commerce REST APIs in both Django REST Framework and Spring Boot — not as exercises,
but as real systems with authentication, product catalogues, orders, and inventory management.
Having gone deep on both, here is an honest comparison backed by concrete code and real trade-offs.

The Baseline: What Both APIs Must Do

For a fair comparison, both APIs implement the same feature set:

• User registration, login, JWT authentication
• Product catalogue with categories, search, and filtering
• Shopping cart (add, update quantity, remove, view)
• Order placement, order history, order status management
• Admin endpoints for product management and order fulfilment
• Pagination on all list endpoints
• Input validation with descriptive error responses

Django REST Framework

Getting Started

Django scaffolds a working API faster than any other framework I know. In the first day:

django-admin startproject ecommerce
cd ecommerce && python manage.py startapp products
pip install djangorestframework djangorestframework-simplejwt django-filter

The product model is straightforward:

class Product(models.Model):
    name        = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    description = models.TextField(blank=True)
    price       = models.DecimalField(max_digits=10, decimal_places=2)
    stock       = models.PositiveIntegerField(default=0)
    category    = models.ForeignKey('Category', on_delete=models.SET_NULL, null=True)
    is_active   = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    created_at  = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

class Meta:
indexes = models.Index(fields='category', 'is_active', '-created_at'])]
`

Django migrations handle schema changes. python manage.py makemigrations && migrate
and the table exists — no SQL to write.

Serialisers and Views