Simon Willison’s Weblog

Django | Multiple Databases. Russell just checked in the final patch developed from Alex Gaynor’s Summer of Code project to add multiple database support to Django. I’d link to the 21,000 line changeset but it crashed our Trac, so here’s the documentation instead. # 22nd December 2009, 5:22 pm

Round-robin Django setup with nginx. An nginx trick I didn’t know: a low proxy_connect_timeout value (e.g. 2 seconds) combined with the proxy_next_upstream setting means that if one of your backends breaks a user won’t even see an error, they’ll just have a short delay before getting a response from a working server. # 21st December 2009, 3:43 pm

Django-Jython 1.1.0 released. Django on Jython matches its minor version numbers to Django, so this new release is compatible with Django 1.1. # 16th December 2009, 10:42 pm

Guardian iPhone app. Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2. # 14th December 2009, 1:29 pm

Fixing Django Management Commands. Zachary Voase proposes dramatically improving Django’s management command API for Django 1.3. I’m in favour—management commands are one of the only APIs in Django that I have to look up every single time I use. My optfunc library was written partially with management commands in mind—Zachary favours the argparse library. # 9th December 2009, 8:41 am

What’s coming in Django 1.2 (presentation notes). I wrote up some background notes for the talk on Django 1.2 I gave at DJUGL last week. # 5th December 2009, 5:10 pm

Opening Up Librelist.com Code, Looking For Volunteers. Zed Shaw’s Librelist is a new service for open source project mailing lists, aiming to be donation supported in a similar way to Freenode IRC. The code is all available, and is written in Lamson and Django. # 4th December 2009, 9:25 am

Haystack 1.0 Final Released. I’ve used Haystack on a number of projects recently, and it has proved itself as a completely painless way of adding full-text search (using Solr or Whoosh—I haven’t tried the Xapian backend yet) to a Django ORM powered project in just a few minutes. Congratulations, Daniel + contributors. # 30th November 2009, 8:07 am

Djangopeople JSON parser. Awesome—Andy McKay has compensated for the lack of an official DjangoPeople API by creating a JSONP screen scraped API and hosting it on App Engine. As far as I’m concerned this is an officially supported feature—I’ll make sure future site changes don’t break it, and when I do add an API I’ll try to keep it compatible and help Andy set up redirects. # 28th November 2009, 11:29 am

Request Routing With URI Templates in Node.JS. I quite like this approach (though the implementation is a bit “this” heavy for my taste). JavaScript has no equivalent to Python’s raw strings, so regular expression based routing ala Django ends up being a bit uglier in JavaScript. URI template syntax is more appealing. # 24th November 2009, 9:06 am

django-batch-select (via) A smart attempt at solving select_related for many-to-many relationships in Django. Add a custom manager to your model and call e.g. Entry.objects.all()[:10].batch_select(“tags”) to execute two queries—one pulling back the first ten entries and another using an “IN” query against the tags table to pull back all of the tags for those entries in one go. # 23rd November 2009, 4:19 pm

Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool. An ultra simple website monitoring tool written in Django which makes it easy to manage a list of Twill scripts for testing different sites. It was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World—Eric showed me a demo if this a year or so ago and I’ve been hoping they would open source it. # 18th November 2009, 12:47 pm

Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers. A surprisingly interesting comparison—the author describes Django as “a framework with CMS-like tendencies” and Drupal as “a CMS with framework-like tendencies”, then explores the benefits of those two different approaches. # 15th November 2009, 10:14 pm

Writing good documentation (part 1). Jacob explains some of the philosophy behind Django’s documentation. Topical guides are particularly interesting—many projects skip them (leaving books to fill the gap) but they fill an essential gap between tutorials and low-level reference documentation. # 11th November 2009, 7:13 am

Correct way to handle mobile browsers. If your site has an equivalent “mobile” version running on a different subdomain, how and when should you redirect mobile users to it and how should you let them opt in or opt out? # 10th November 2009, 8:57 am

Django-Jython 1.0.0 released! Now with database backends for PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL. The next release (planned for next month) should provide full compatibility with Django 1.1—the current release has 1.1 support for PostgreSQL but only 1.0 support for the other two databases. # 9th November 2009, 1:53 pm

Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search. Eric Holscher shows how Haystack uses a number of common Django patterns (object registration, pluggable backends, QuerySet-style chaining and class-based views) to great effect in creating a powerful search application for Django. Makes me wonder if more of those patterns should be promoted to first class concepts within Django. # 3rd November 2009, 10:42 am

Django 1.2 planned features. The votes are in and the plan for Django 1.2 has taken shape - features are split in to high, medium and low priority. There's some really exciting stuff in there - outside of the things I've already talked about, I'm particularly excited about multidb, Model.objects.raw(SQL), the smarter {% if %} tag and class-based generic views. # 26th October 2009, 10:38 am

Play framework for Java. I’m genuinely impressed by this—it’s a full stack web framework for Java that actually does feel a lot like Django or Rails. Best feature: code changes are automatically detected and reloaded by the development web server, giving you the same save-and-refresh workflow you get in Django (no need to compile and redeploy to try out your latest changes). # 25th October 2009, 11:21 pm

Introducing Cloudera Desktop. It’s a GUI for Hadoop, and under the hood is a whole stack of open source software, including Python, Django, MooTools, Twisted, lxml, CherryPy, Mako, Java and AspectJ. # 21st October 2009, 6:48 pm

nginx_http_push_module. More clever design with webhooks—here’s an nginx module that provides a comet endpoint URL which will hang until a back end process POSTs to another URL on the same server. This makes it much easier to build asynchronous comet apps using regular synchronous web frameworks such as Django, PHP and Rails. # 17th October 2009, 4:48 pm

Django security updates released. A potential denial of service vulnerability has been discovered in the regular expressions used by Django form library’s EmailField and URLField—a malicious input could trigger a pathological performance. Patches (and patched releases) for Django 1.1 and Django 1.0 have been published. # 10th October 2009, 12:24 am

MichaelMoore.com in Django. A seriously impressive case study—a complete rebuild from the ground up completed in just five weeks using Django, Solr and Haystack for a high traffic site with a top 10,000 US Alexa ranking. # 9th October 2009, 12:38 am

History of Django’s popularity. “What sequence of events made Django the most popular Python web framework?”—insightful answers from Alex Martelli and James Bennett. # 4th October 2009, 10:29 am

MySQL Connector/Python. A pure Python implementation of the MySQL client/server protocol, meaning you can talk to a MySQL server from Python without needing to first install the MySQL client libraries (which often requires compiling from source). # 2nd October 2009, 2:16 pm

TypePad Motion. Launched today at FOWA, Motion is a microblogging application written in Django that uses the TypePad API for all persistent storage—which means you can deploy it as server-side code on your own site, but scaling horizontally is handled by TypePad (you just need to scale out the state-free front end). # 1st October 2009, 3:51 pm

GeoDjango and the UK postcode database. Excellent introduction to GeoDjango using the recently leaked UK postcode database. Obviously, you should only follow the steps in this tutorial using the officially licensed database, available for a mere £1,700. # 30th September 2009, 2:25 pm

Adding signing (and signed cookies) to Django core. I’ve been increasing my participation in Django recently—here’s my proposal for adding signing and signed cookies to Django, which I’d personally like to see ship as part of Django 1.2. # 24th September 2009, 7:31 pm