E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Django progress

As of yesterday, Django has changed its model syntax. So code that formerly looked like this: 

class Comment(meta.Model): 
    fields = (
        meta.TextField('comment', 'comment', maxlength=3000), 
        meta.CharField('headline', 'headline', maxlength=255, blank=True)
    )

will now look like this: 

class Comment(meta.Model): 
    comment = meta.TextField(maxlength=3000) 
    headline = meta.CharField(maxlength=255, blank=True)

Sweet. This brings Django more in line with the Rails philosophy that syntax matters. Making things easier for the developer to type, remember, and read can only bring good things.

This change was also a nice demonstration of 1) the incipient Django community's energy and smarts, 2) the core Django developers' willingness to let that community take the wheel, and 3) the benefits of taking the thing public before 1.0 so that good but API-breaking changes like this one can be implemented with minimal pain. Those guys are working hard.

Read the full instructions and watch the screencast to learn more about the change.

Friday, August 26th, 2005
+ +

Some related posts: A little something I've been working on • Rails security hole hullabaloo • YAPWF: Aaron Swartz's web.py released • Ruby on Rails 1.0 • TrimPath Junction: a pure Javascript clone of Rails • Controller freaks • YAPWF: TurboGears • Django, Rails, and PHP • Everything on Rails • Python web framework mania

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