Simon Willison’s Weblog

Building Search DSLs with Django (via) Neat tutorial by Dan Lamanna: how to build a GitHub-style search feature—supporting modifiers like “is:open author:danlamanna”—using PyParsing and the Django ORM. # 19th June 2023, 8:30 am

Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps (via) The opening section of this article has very little to do with Django: it’s an insightful description of the technical challenges faced by a startup that is still seeking product-market fit. Alex then extends that into his own architectural recommendations for startups building with Django to help waste as little time as possible on problems that aren’t core to the product they are building. # 24th June 2021, 8:43 pm

Django Bakery (via) “A set of helpers for baking your Django site out as flat files”. Released by the LA Times Data Desk, who use it for a large number of projects from election results to data journalism interactives. Statically publishing these projects to S3 lets them handle huge traffic spikes at a very low cost. # 16th June 2018, 1:49 am

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. People’s names are complicated. I’m not at all comfortable with the commonly used first name / last name distinction (as baked in to Django auth) since it doesn’t take cultural factors in to account. # 17th June 2010, 7:44 pm

On Django And Migrations. South author Andrew Godwin on the plans for migrations in Django. His excellent South migration library will be split in to two parts—one handling database abstraction, dependency resolution and history tracking and the other providing autodetection and the South user interface. The former will go in to Django proper, encouraging other migration libraries to share the same core abstractions. # 2nd June 2010, 4:27 pm

Appending the request URL to SQL statements in Django. A clever frame-walking monkey-patch which pulls the most recent HttpRequest object out of the Python stack and adds the current request.path to each SQL query as an SQL comment, so you can see it in debugging tools such as slow query logs and the PostgreSQL “select * from pg_stat_activity” query. # 2nd June 2010, 9:09 am

django-boss (via) Management commands are one of the few bits of Django that I still have to look up in the documentation whenever I write them. django-boss offers a smart alternative to regular management commands, based around decorators and taking the containing app as the first argument. # 1st June 2010, 10:02 am

Towards a Standard for Django Session Messages. I completely agree that Django’s user.message_set (which I helped design) is unfit for purpose, but I don’t think sessions are the right solution for messages sent to users. A signed cookie containing either the full message or a key referencing the message body on the server is a much more generally useful solution as it avoids the need for a round trip to a persistent store entirely. # 19th June 2009, 9:57 pm

Investigate your MP’s expenses. Launched today, this is the project that has been keeping me ultra-busy for the past week—we’re crowdsourcing the analysis of the 700,000+ scanned MP expenses documents released this morning. It’s the Guardian’s first live Django-powered application, and also the first time we’ve hosted something on EC2. # 18th June 2009, 11:16 pm

Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout. Useful, detailed instructions... but I still think this stuff is Way Too Difficult at the moment. I’m a big fan of the idea of sites that are assembled from multiple smaller web services talking HTTP to each other, but ensuring all the moving parts stay running is massively more painful than just running Apache and MySQL. # 7th June 2009, 1:54 pm

Graphite. Real-time graphing package for server monitoring, similar to RRDTool. Created by the team at Orbitz, using Django and ExtJS for the frontend and Cairo to generate the graphs. # 28th June 2008, 11:53 pm

CookBookNewFormsFieldOrdering. Handy tip—change the order of fields in a Django newforms instance by over-riding form.fields.keyOrder (since fields is a SortedDict). # 27th June 2008, 1:02 am

mod_rpaf for Apache. A more secure alternative to Django’s equivalent middleware: sets the REMOTE_ADDR of incoming requests from whitelisted load balancers to the X-Forwarded-For header, without any risk that if the load balancers are missing attackers could abuse it to spoof their IP addresses. # 24th June 2008, 5:02 pm

Django snippets: Command to dump data as a python script. Extremely useful—dumps the data for an application as an executable Python script which will re-import it in to another database without any risk of colliding with existing IDs, sorting out foreign keys along the way. # 24th June 2008, 12:07 pm

The basics of creating a tumblelog with Django (via) Ryan Berg suggests having a StreamItem model that links uses a GenericForeignKey to link to other content types, then using signals to cause a StreamItem to be created for every other model type. I should switch to doing that on this blog: at the moment I have to query three separate tables to build the tumblelog part which results in messy code for ordering and pagination. # 24th June 2008, 11:09 am

What is it like to write a technical book? Plenty of food for thought from the lead author of the new edition of High Performance MySQL. It’s amazing how Word is still an integral part of most technical book projects despite its obvious inadequacies compared to a toolchain based on plain text files and Subversion (the Django Book used ReST and Subversion to great effect). # 20th June 2008, 8:18 am

PortingDjangoTo3k. Martin von Loewis has started assembling a patch. His write-up illustrates some key differences between Python 2.X and Python 3—it looks like Django’s unicode handling is going to require the most work. # 19th June 2008, 5:53 pm

New foundation for Django. Django now has its own nonprofit software foundation (courtesy of a bunch of tough paperwork by Jacob Kaplan-Moss), and fittingly the Lawrence-Journal World get the exclusive. # 17th June 2008, 5:16 pm

DebugFooter middleware with Pygments sql syntax highlighting. Andreas Marr has enhanced my Django DebugFooter middleware with proper syntax highlighting for the logged SQL. # 14th June 2008, 10:04 am

Censoring the Internet at Paraguay. The state owned telecommunication company DNS hijacked the opposition party’s domain to point at a porn site during the election back in April. Maybe we don’t want a django.py vanity domain after all... # 13th June 2008, 3:24 pm

RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline. Jacob’s proposed target is “early September” for the final 1.0 release. # 12th June 2008, 10:34 am

Shortcutting render_to_response. I tend to use a simple wrapper function, but the other options described here are worth exploring. This is why I’m so keen on Django’s “take a request object, return a response object” philosophy—it makes it trivial to extend the framework in the direction you want. # 10th June 2008, 11:49 am

Django status update: June 26. Outstanding detailed overview of recent happenings in the Django community, courtesy of Clint Ecker. # 27th June 2007, 2:30 pm

Django-fr. Community site for French language Django developers. They’ve already made a promising start on translating the documentation. # 21st June 2007, 10:50 am

Washington Post and Facebook. Deryck Hodge on hacking against Facebook API using Django. # 19th June 2007, 10:33 am

Doing Local Right. The slides from my presentation at @media 2007. # 9th June 2007, 7:31 pm

Deploying a Django app on the desktop. Silver Stripe used cx_freeze to package their commercial agile project management Django application as an easy to run Windows executable. # 1st June 2007, 9:45 pm

Django and JSON. Neat trick to serialize Djange QuerySets as JSON. # 20th June 2006, 8:16 am