Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 20th September 2012

Why is everyone so obsessed with picking faults with Apple’s new maps on the iPhone?

Because this is actually a really big deal. For a lot of people (especially those who live in a big city like London or New York) the maps app is one of the most-used apps on their phone. The new iOS maps are a huge regression, not just in terms of map quality but also in terms of search results. On iOS 6 (at least here in the UK) you can’t even type in a simple address and trust that your phone will show you a pin in the right place.

[... 143 words]

Why doesn’t the Django framework come with its own REST API out of the box?

I’d argue that it does. If you want to build a REST API you need to be able to map incoming HTTP requests to handler functions based on their URL, run some custom code and return an HTTP response containing JSON (or maybe XML). Django makes all of this really simple.

[... 330 words]

What is a development framework?

The most useful distinction, in my opinion, is to think about the difference between a framework and a library.

[... 271 words]

2012 » September

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