Back in the Django saddle

http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-to-django/

by slig • 15 years ago

212 44 15 years ago

Really excited about the move to GitHub!

It's great to hear that Django is moving to GitHub. It seems like the Python community has been slow to adopt git, perhaps because Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, and perhaps because GitHub uses Ruby. That said, it seems like git is emerging as the winner, and IMHO GitHub is far superior to anything available outside of git, so I'm glad they're making the move.

sc68cal• 15 years ago

Indeed, this is good news - there have always been a pull request or two on the Django GitHub mirror that would need to be closed and redirected to the Django project bug tracker, where they would need to generate a patch. This always slowed contributions and made people who genuinely wanted to help jump through needless hoops.

zalew2• 15 years ago

heh, I myself started using HG partly because of language patriotism, partly because Bitbucket (running on Django) had a better offer than Github. yet one had to be out of his mind not to like Django moving to any of those providers. it's a great step. (a little tiny bit sad they didn't choose hg/bitbucket ;))

the move surprised me a bit, AFAIR when this topic (moving to a DVCS) was raised on DjangoCons, Russel explained that's not a priority (correct me if my memory fails).

eli• 15 years ago

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I would imagine Adrian's list of priorities represents just that -- the things he wants to work on.

briancurtin• 15 years ago

> It seems like the Python community has been slow to adopt git, perhaps because Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, and perhaps because GitHub uses Ruby.

For a lot of people in the Python world, choosing a DVCS just means picking what CPython picked (hg). At the time, that decision was at least partly due to the fact that git had poor Windows support, and less about the languages involved (GitHub/Ruby weren't a factor anyway since it would be a self-hosted git install).

If the decision was to be made again today, most people I've talked to think git would be the choice.

glenjamin• 15 years ago

My experience is still that git is at best a second class citizen on windows, in terms of installation, performance and usability.

Is this no longer the case in some way?

frankwiles• 15 years ago

Welcome back Adrian!

maxklein• 15 years ago

This is why Django is so slow moving. People are not really spending time developing it. Thank goodness there is Bottle.py and Flask now.

kgrin• 15 years ago

Not that it couldn't move faster, and I'm all for more Python web frameworks, but Django has certainly made significant progress.

I suspect most people (that is, developers who use the framework but don't necessarily contribute to it) probably couldn't tell that a BDFL has basically been MIA - it doesn't feel like development's stopped altogether (although again, yes, it can obviously be sped up, everyone's got their own pet features, etc.)

arctangent2• 15 years ago

Django and Flask aim to solve different types of problem.

jokull2• 15 years ago

I would argue that's not quite the case. So if they solve different problems you could hypothetically use them in the same projects? Possible, but hardly the case in real world scenarios.

mazelife• 15 years ago

Having attended the last couple of US iterations of Djangocon, being a close follower of the django-dev list, etc. that's not at all my interpretation. Also, spend a bit of time here: https://code.djangoproject.com/ and I don't see how you could come away with the impression that Django development is moribund.

And while I like Bottle and Flask, their aim is widely different from Django's.

gbog• 15 years ago

Why should it move fast? Many excellent software don't move fast and are a please, think Vim or Putty. Moreover moving often means adding the last stuff en vogue, and it adds bloat and dependencies.

cavilling_elite• 15 years ago

Welcome back, I am really interested to hear what "changes were made to the framework that [Adrian] would've prevented had [he] been more involved."

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

I've tried several times but I just can't bring myself to enjoy using Django. I am a Pyramid/Pylons guy all the way.

kmfrk• 15 years ago

I am most interested to see what the transition from SHA1 to PBKDF2[1][2] will mean for Django. I have wanted to just switch to bcrypt, but it's such a pain in the ass to manage on Windows and will probably break for users testing my projects locally.

It's not like SHA1 is tantamount to leaving the barn door open, but it doesn't sit well with me to stick with it, until it is replaced natively.

[1] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.django.devel/332...

[2] https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15367

rglullis• 15 years ago

What is wrong with https://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/django-bcrypt/ ?

At least on Linux, I installed it and had no issue whatsoever.

po• 15 years ago

There's nothing wrong with django-bcrypt. The main reason for picking PBKDF2 is because it can be implemented without pulling in a dependency to the core framework. The Django team does a lot of work to maintain backwards-compatability and smooth upgrades which is why having this in core is important to me.

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

Python (and Django) prides itself on being cross-platform. Installing bcrypt on Windows is a huge PITA.

reinhardt• 15 years ago

"... and changes were made to the framework that I would've prevented had I been more involved."

Such as?

LeafStorm2• 15 years ago

One thing that I think the Django core team needs to work on is documenting best practices. And I know that there are a bunch of different huge companies who build things in Django and all have different standards for how to develop and deploy, but just running

    $ django-admin.py startproject PROJECT
    $ cd PROJECT
    $ python manage.py startapp

is simply not cutting it.

philipkimmey• 15 years ago

I totally agree - having no standards around common problems (like how to deal with tests once they get too big for a single tests.py) is extremely inconvenient.

nicpottier• 15 years ago

I thought the general solution to this was just to create a /tests directory and stuff everything in there, broken out as you wish?

Did I just make that up?

bad_user• 15 years ago

That's because Django, while monolithic, is in many ways based on pythonic principles.

In Ruby, for instance, you really need conventions as in Ruby the concept of packages and how they get included / used is a lot more relaxed.

In Python tests.py is a package as far as Python is concerned. If it gets too big you can make it a directory and break its contents in several sub-packages. I did this with everything else too, like views.py or models.py

The one concept Django has that I consider a flaw is in fact non-pythonic - apps. That's because apps are not just simple packages. Instead apps are packages that have to be specified in an INSTALLED_APPS constant in a top-level "settings" package. This makes using parts of Django in scripts a PITA, as your script needs an accompanying settings file. Also, apps are not properly defined either and in some instances an app must have a "models" subpackage (or at least this used to be the case).

mazzer• 15 years ago

I've always thought there has been dissonance between the remarkable amount of "this is how we did it at the paper" baked into the code and the libertarian "you should do what works for you" in the docs.

(What worked at the paper has always worked well for me, of course, but I've never been too adventurous about straying.)

mkramlich• 15 years ago

You could ask for a refund. :) Otherwise you just might have to figure out how to do it yourself. That is how the world works fundamentally. You're actually lucky you're getting Django for free, providing so much functionality out-of-the-box. TANSTAAFL.

oinopion• 15 years ago

Why? Django (trunk) has new files layout.

    $ django-admin.py startproject testo 
    $ cd testo
    $ ./manage.py startapp testapp

    $ tree                                                                                                    
    .
    ├── manage.py
    ├── testapp
    │   ├── __init__.py
    │   ├── models.py
    │   ├── tests.py
    │   └── views.py
    └── testo
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── settings.py
        ├── urls.py
        └── wsgi.py

LeafStorm2• 15 years ago

...You know, this actually makes a heck of a lot more sense. Hopefully they'll follow it up with some more docs on how you can develop with virtualenv and the like.

capkutay• 15 years ago

I'm curious to see if any improvements to GeoDjango will be made in the near future...trying to decide if django is the right tool for an app with GIS capabilities.

SammyRulez• 15 years ago

Good to hear that "this week in django" will be back.. but the podcast edition would be a great plus for the community.

minikomi• 15 years ago

Though not a Django user, I immediately wished this existed for a number of other frameworks/projects. What a great idea to keep people interested in the project.

tocomment• 15 years ago

What are the best practices for testing in Django? I feel silly testing my models. And testing my views also seems kind of awkward. But then there's nothing else to test.

Any advice?

numix• 15 years ago

This really depends on your situation. If you are writing a reusable app, then you probably want both unit tests and a sample project to run integration tests against.

For testing a basic website, you'll probably want to test any custom managers or model methods, and your views. A good guide to getting started is here: http://toastdriven.com/blog/2011/apr/10/guide-to-testing-in-...

For full-stack tests, you can use something like Splinter (http://splinter.cobrateam.info/).

Back in the Django saddle

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