Django

This is one of the coolest Django hacks ever. Marxy writes that he's gotten Django running on a Windows Mobile 5 PDA. Although I won't be switching my various Django production servers from Linux to Windows PDA any time soon, it's cool to see ... [More] that this is possible, and it's a testament to Python's flexibility. Plus, it could even come in handy for developers of PDA applications. Nice hack, Marxy! [Less]

Jacob and I are excited to announce the pre-release of The Django Book! Starting today, The Django book is available at djangobook.com. We'll be unveiling one or two chapters each week until the whole book is available. The first two chapters are ... [More] available now. This is a pre-release, which means we're actively looking for comments, typo fixes, corrections and other suggestions from readers like you, all around the world. We'll try to incorporate your suggestions into the final product, which will be published by Apress early next year. Amazon.com is accepting preorders for the print edition, and the number of preorders so far has been astounding. Unlike other pre-release books, we're making this process completely free and open, rather than charging you money for the privilege of submitting book improvements. (That always seemed a bit odd to us.) The book is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means it's free to read and redistribute. We're in this to improve the (already excellent) Django documentation, not to make a quick buck. How can you submit comments and typo fixes? By posting inline comments, of course! Jacob has knocked out a fantastic, Django-powered inline comment system that allows you to post comments to any particular paragraph in the book. Read all about it. (For those of you interested in the code, stay tuned. We'll be cleaning it up and releasing it. Many thanks to Jack Slocum for laying the groundwork.) So, dive in, let us know what you think, and check back regularly for the latest chapter updates. There's an Atom feed that'll get updated each time we release new material. [Less]

A couple of weekends ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at a two-day Ajax / Web development seminar at Harvard University with fellow Django creator Simon Willison and Dojo wizard Alex Russell. The event, "Deep Ajax," was put on by the Greater ... [More] Boston Chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). The Django presentation went well, and I've posted the slides online: PDF file (229 KB) PowerPoint file (221 KB) It's an intro to Django with a focus on how to do Ajax. It's more of a typical PowerPoint presentation than we Django guys usually do. Code snippets, yes. Funny pictures, not so much. These presentations are available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Feel free to use them (or snippets of them) in your own presentations. [Less]

Wow, we couldn't be more pleased with the feedback we've been getting for The Django Book. When we launched last week, it hit the front page of Digg for a while, it hit del.icio.us popular and it was talked-about all over the Web by Django fans and ... [More] non-Django users alike. But most importantly, we've gotten hundreds of helpful inline comments on the first two chapters, including almost a dozen typo fixes and wording suggestions within the first couple of hours! We've been rolling the suggestions into the book as time allows and removing the relevant comments from display after we've incorporated the suggestions, so as not to confuse readers. Many thanks to the dozens of contributors so far. Moving along, we've posted Chapter 3, The Basics of Generating Web Pages. After two introductory chapters, this is starting to get into the meat of Django. Chapter 4 should be coming later today, or tomorrow at the latest, as we're still putting the finishing editing touches on it for public release. Keep the great suggestions comin'! UPDATE: We've added Chapter 4. It's quite long and may cause some JavaScript slowness; we'll look into this, possibly splitting it up over two pages. [Less]

Web framework comparisons are inevitable, and they've been showing up more and more often. A couple of weeks ago, Alan Green and Ben Askins put together a "RailsVsDjango" report, and they presented their findings at the Open Source Developers' ... [More] Conference in Melbourne, Australia. In the latest batch, both from the last 24 hours, we've got a relatively flame-baitish comparison of Django and Rails, along with a much more constructive comparison. Reading comparisons like this, I'm always reminded of a Mark Pilgrim piece from a couple of years ago. Person 1: "What do you do for a living?" Person 2: "I work with computers." Person 1: "So do I! What do you do with computers?" Person 2: "I'm a Web developer." Person 1: "So am I! Design, client-side programming or server-side programming?" Person 2: "Server-side programming." Person 1: "Same here! Do you use dynamically typed languages or statically typed languages?" Person 2: "Dynamically typed languages." Person 1: "So do I! Do you use a Web framework, or do you roll things on your own?" Person 2: "I use a Web framework." Person 1: "So do I! Django or Rails?" Person 2: "Django." Person 1: "Die, heretic scum!" [Less]

It's that time of year again! PyCon 2007 is is rapidly approaching with an amazing line-up of talks on all sorts of Python-related topics. If you've got the opportunity, I highly recommend going. The conference is a steal at $195 ... [More] ($125 for students) if you register before January 15th. Of course, there's also a large array of Django-oriented activities at PyCon; here's a list of the (officially planned) activities (in chronological order): On Feb 22nd (the tutorial day) I (Jacob) will be teaching back-to-back three-hour Django tutorials. The morning tutorial is an introduction to Django designed for anyone interested in getting started with Django. After lunch, I'll move on to an advanced Django tutorial, covering a lot of what goes on under the hood. Anyone who knows Django and wants to dig deeper should really enjoy this one. You can, of course, sign up for both. (I should point out by way of disclaimer that I get a bit of money for each person who attends one of my tutorials. I'd promote them here anyway, of course, but full disclosure is the best policy and all that.) During the conference proper, I'll be talking about the lessons in Open Source development that we've learned in 18 months of running the Django project. It's been an amazing ride, and we've all learned a huge amount about what it means to be involved in Open Source. This talk is tentatively scheduled for Saturday (Feb. 25th), but the schedule is still being finalized so that date may change. There's also a web frameworks panel planned for Friday (Feb. 24th) afternoon. Titus Brown plans to bring together developers from the many Python web frameworks; I'm really looking forward to seeing all these different points of views. Finally, we'll again hold a Django sprint in the four days following the conference (Feb. 26th through Mar. 1st). If you've never attending a sprint before, you can read more about sprinting on the PyCon wiki; essentially sprints are a focused development session wherein a bunch of developers gather in a room and bang out code. We've not yet decided on what we'll focus on during the sprint, but if you're interested in getting involved in Django development (or if you're involved already), we'd be happy to have you! I'll probably give an informal "how to contribute to Django" session on the first day of the sprint for anyone who's interested. I hope to see a bunch of Djangonauts there. I've been to PyCon for the last couple of years, and it's always been fantastic, and I can see from the line-up of talks that this year will be no exception. Remember to register before Jan. 15th if you want to save sixty bucks! [Less]

I love this quote from Scott Gilbertson at Wired.com: Django is a framework built on Python that you can use to build a Content Management System or a blogging tool, but it is not limited to that. In fact Django reminds me a bit of the character ... [More] in Airplane who always answers the “what do you make of that?” question literally… Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl… You’d be hard pressed to find something in the world of web development that Django can’t make. [Less]

As Django has grown popular and more people have been submitting feature ideas and bug reports, we've had problems scaling our human resources to handle the extra workload. Helpful bug reports got lost in the Great Sea of Tickets, which was ... [More] frustrating to both contributors and maintainers. Fortunately, we hope to have fixed that. As of yesterday evening, we've completely revamped our ticket workflow, along with the software we use to manage it. We spent some time discussing the issues over the past week, and yesterday Jacob installed a brand-new version of Trac, our bug-tracking software, and customized it to fit the optimized ticket workflow we came up with. What's changed? First, if you've submitted a ticket in the past, you'll notice that the "Create New Ticket" page is much simpler. We've removed the fields that we weren't using and cleaned up the layout a bit. Next, we changed the functionality of the existing-ticket page, adding fields such as "Needs documentation," "Has patch" and "Needs tests." These new fields are much more in-line with our ticket triage process. From now on, every new ticket will be categorized according to these criteria by our new ticket managers (more on them in a bit), entering the workflow described on our ticket triage page. In short: a ticket comes in and a ticket manager assesses it as either "accepted," "invalid/worksforme" or "requires a design decision." If it's accepted, we'll keep track of the three essential parts of a solution -- a patch, documentation and unit tests. Once those three parts have been submitted and meet our standards, the ticket will be marked as "ready for checkin." We've got a fancy new diagram that explains this whole process. This new process has a multitude of advantages. Ticket submitters get much more detailed (and quicker) feedback about the status of their tickets. Committers get more helpful reports about exactly which tickets are ready to be looked at. People looking to help out with small tasks can now access useful reports -- e.g., tickets needing unit tests or tickets needing documentation -- for a clear list of where they can chip in. The whole process is much more in line with the workflow we've adapted over the past year, and I suspect our ticket responsiveness will improve greatly. The last, most important, piece of the puzzle, is that we now have official ticket managers, a group of volunteers who work together to manage ticket metadata and otherwise streamline the process. Although anyone can -- and is encouraged to -- help out keeping tickets organized, these folks have volunteered to take ownership of the ticket tracker in the long term. Please welcome Chris Beaven (SmileyChris), Simon Greenhill, Michael Radziej and Gary Wilson! [Less]

If you're a Django user in or around Vancouver, check out the Vancouver Django Jam, an event put together by the local Python users group. It's happening on Sunday and Tuesday. Sunday is your chance to discuss and show off Django apps with other ... [More] people. On Tuesday, I (Adrian) will be showing off some cool new Django features, and we'll have an open Q&A session. (I'll be in town for the Web Directions North conference.) See you in Vancouver! [Less]