Posts tagged: DJANGO

I find Rob Curley interesting for many reasons:

• Until recently, he worked as director of New Media and Convergence for The World Company of Lawrence, Kansas, which sounds kind of weird and obscure if you don’t know that LJworld.com is possibly the most award-winningest, cutting-edge local news site in existence.

• The World Company and its web projects gave birth to Django.

• He is at heart a newspaper guy. Two or three careers ago I was a newspaper guy too (though the paper was weekly rather than daily).

The recent posting by Ben Bangert entitled “Best of breed Controllers for MVC web frameworks” is interesting reading. (Also see his followup with corrections.) Rather than trying to stage a showdown, he’s noting significant similarities between the controller styles in CherryPy, Myghty, Bricks, Aquarium, Ruby on Rails, and Django. The implication I take is that this (mostly independent) convergence might be telling us something about smart web application development.

The post is worth reading for the comment thread alone, with posts from core Zope, CherryPy, Django, and TurboGears developers (among others) and a great little discussion of the history of object publishing on the web.

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.

Sam Newman has posted a useful high-level comparison of Django and Rails on his site. In it, I think he hits on one little-discussed reason why these two projects are grabbing so much mindshare right now:

[Rails and Django] … historically would have ended up being written in Perl or PHP - but ended up being written in Ruby and Python respectively.

When I heard DHH speak at OSCON, he mentioned switching to Ruby after giving up on trying to make PHP do the kind of stuff he wanted to do. Back in July I asked Simon Willison (of the Django team) about PHP; he said that both he and Adrian Holovaty had worked in PHP for years, but it was Python that “gave us the flexibility we needed to pull everything off.”

It was a busy week in the world of Python web frameworks.

The CherryPy project released its 2.1 beta.

Subway, a Ruby-on-Rails-style stack that builds on CherryPy, released its first milestone.

But the biggest news has been the release of the Django framework. Like Rails, Django grew out of real, production web apps and is going public with a lot of momentum. It seems to strike a nice balance between power and simplicity. Doesn’t hurt that the website looks pretty, either…