> 1) Generate your application. This is a single command line command. 2) Edit it a little, add a text box and some buttons. 3) Deploy it to google app engine;

> 1) Generate your application. This is a single command line command. 2) Edit it a little, add a text box and some buttons. 3) Deploy it to google app engine; this is a single command line command, too. That will create a toy application. If you want to create a production application you need to handle data. To handle data you will need: * Tables / lists to display the data * Views to edit and display the data * Forms to edit the data * Auditing of the user actions * User authentication + authorization All these are not trivial to create in an SPA especially since you'll always need both server and client side code. With django (or rails, or spring or various other server only frameworks) you won't need to write client code and most of these components will be auto-generated (at leas their default values). For your last comment, I also agree that if you know rails then you don't really need to learn django since they are both similar (however I do profer django because of its no magic philisophy and because python is a better language than ruby) but I believe that you also don't need to go the SPA route until somebody specifically asks for an SPA and has good reasons asking for it (or you want to learn the technology and modern frameworks that surround SPAs). As a final comment, I have to say that really like all those modern frameworks (especiall react and redux) but I won't consider them for my day-to-day job since instead of creating something in 1 week I'd need 1 month using these technologies.