Django 1.6 alpha 1 released

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/may/26/django-16-alpha-1/

by Lightning • 13 years ago

126 35 13 years ago

Good. Keep it coming. For those who are interested further, here are the release notes to see "What’s new in Django 1.6" http://j.mp/13XRnoD

itafroma2• 13 years ago

Unshortened URL for the release notes: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.6/

manojlds• 13 years ago

This is the most exciting and interesting thing in the release:

Persistent database connections

Django now supports reusing the same database connection for several requests. This avoids the overhead of re-establishing a connection at the beginning of each request. For backwards compatibility, this feature is disabled by default. See Persistent connections for details.

elithrar• 13 years ago

> This is the most exciting and interesting thing in the release:

Absolutely. My expectation is that this alone should dramatically increase app response times for any reasonably DB-dependant application.

mixedbit• 13 years ago

It does. You can currently do this with an external Django DB Pool module, for some numbers see: http://mixedbit.org/blog/2013/02/06/django_db_pool_on_heroku...

I also can't wait to have such mode fully supported by the core product.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Typo or sarcasm?

dodyg• 13 years ago

Connection pooling? I am surprised to find out that Django doesn't have this feature until now. Is there any specific reason why this wasn't implemented much earlier? Old tech like plain asp had this more than a decade ago.

niels• 13 years ago

There are external apps that provide this. https://github.com/gmcguire/django-db-pool https://github.com/kennethreitz/django-postgrespool https://github.com/niwibe/djorm-ext-pool

est• 13 years ago

So, when will we have prepared statements upon persistent connections? This would be the biggest speed up of all factors.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

As soon as someone decides to develop it. Remember: Django is open source software, maintained by a community of competent, dedicated and exceedingly generous developers who give us the privilege of using their software for free.

SiVal2• 13 years ago

I just read through the entire, long release document, which listed dozens of changes, large and small. Not a single mention of Python 3 that I could see (though, of course, I could have missed it.) This was supposed to have been the first version of Django in--how many years?--that the version of Python you could build production websites with was the current Python, not a legacy.

That this fact is not the headline, and apparently not even considered worthy of mention in a long list of "miscellaneous" items, suggests that those of us who aren't legacy Python 2 users (and don't ever intend to be) just aren't Django's target market. Django has been around for a relatively long time accumulating so many long-time users that I understand the desire to make supporting those who long ago entrusted their businesses to Django the #1 priority. The flip side of that, though, is that those of us without such a legacy would seem destined to be lower priority, maybe significantly lower, for at least a few more years.

If there is no Flask in the next year or so that is redesigned to focus primarily on Python 3 web dev, we'll still use Python 3 for various tasks, but for web dev it might make more sense for us to just move on to another language with a more-recently-designed framework.

crdoconnor• 13 years ago

Django has supported python 3 since version 1.5 - the last major release:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/python3/

jacobian6• 13 years ago

Wow, you're really making a ton of assumptions based on no evidence. I'm sorry you have such trouble assuming good faith.

Fact is, we just forgot to mention it. Django's working so well on Py3 that it kinda seems like no big deal any more, so we forgot to mention it in the release notes. I'll fix that once I get a chance.

yuvadam• 13 years ago

I would take a look at the actual implementation [1].

It is clearly not a full-featured connection pool. Sure, it gives some quick performance wins within each thread, but this is no proper cross-process connection pool.

[1] https://github.com/django/django/commit/2ee21d9f0d9eaed0494f...

Aqwis• 13 years ago

Are there usually this many backwards-incompatible changes? In the past I've usually been able to upgrade Django without having to do any significant changes in the code.

ubernostrum• 13 years ago

So, it's a big list. But a lot of them are either:

* Fallout from transaction changes. Whether this affects your code will vary, and when and how it can affect your code is documented, or

* Bugfixes: lots of the stuff in there consists of "we had a bug, we fixed the bug, but you should know this in case you relied on the buggy behavior".

Split those out and it's actually quite a bit shorter.

foobarram3• 13 years ago

Pardon my ignorance but, `Persistent database connections`

Is this the same as pgBouncer connection pooling? It does sound like the same - but unsure. I just spent a week learning and configuring pgBouncer! :(

jacobian6• 13 years ago

Not exactly. It's not proper connection pooling -- for that, you still should be using an external pool like pgbouncer. Instead this is a single persistent connection per thread. The speed improvement should be about the same, but you something like pgbouncer gives you more control over the number of connections and offers a ton of extra features.

foobarram3• 13 years ago

Thank you very much for the clarification `jacobian` - I am assuming that django's connection pooling on 1.6 would still play nice with pgBouncer.

speg• 13 years ago

Have they moved to a faster release schedule? I feel like 1.5 just came out and we can already expect 1.6 in August (not that I'm complaining about it).

zalew• 13 years ago

probably because 1.5 was the first release that didn't block master branch during the feature freeze period, so work targetting 1.6 was already progressing on master during the 1.5 bugfixing schedule.

jacobian6• 13 years ago

We're trying to, yeah.

For this release specifically we wanted to have it out before the end of summer so that we can be ready to merge Andrew's migration work and any GSoC code and turn around another release quickly.

vonseel• 13 years ago

I'm amazed by the rate of the Django releases lately; the core devs must be very busy.

Django 1.6 alpha 1 released

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