565 items tagged “django”
The Django web framework.
2010
Who are the best Python developers in Los Angeles?
Mahalo is based in Santa Monica, and they have a very talented team of Python/Django people. They also host a regular Django meetup: http://www.meetup.com/ladjango/
[... 40 words]What’s the easiest way to take an existing Django view and make it “real time” via long polling?
I’d advocate decoupling your long polling endpoints entirely from the rest of your web app stack. Personally I like Node.js for this, but Tornado would work just fine too (I’ve experimented successfully with Tornado long polling in the past).
[... 171 words]Django (web framework): Why did theonion.com stop using Drupal?
They wrote about their reasons in detail in a post to the Django sub-reddit a while ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/django/c...
[... 165 words]Which Solr app for Django is better: Haystack or django-solr-search (solango)?
I’d go with Haystack—while it supports multiple backends, I get the feeling Solr is the principle backend it was developed for. It’s extremely well documented in my opinion, and the SearchQuerySet API it gives you makes running low-level queries really easy if the higher level class-based view it provides don’t do quite what you want.
[... 109 words]What is the highest traffic website built on top of Django?
My best guess would be Disqus. Instagram are pretty enormous these days as well.
[... 31 words]What is the history of the Django web framework? Why has it been described as “developed in a newsroom”?
I was there!
[... 674 words]What is the history of Django? I’ve been playing with Quora—it’s a really neat twist on the question-and-answer format, which makes great use of friends, followers and topics and has some very neat live update stuff going on (using Comet on top of Tornado). I just posted quite a long answer to a question about the history of Django.
Hookbox (via) For most web projects, I believe implementing any real-time comet features on a separate stack from the rest of the application makes sense—keep using Rails, Django or PHP for the bulk of the application logic, and offload any WebSocket or Comet requests to a separate stack built on top of something like Node.js, Twisted, EventMachine or Jetty. Hookbox is the best example of that philosophy I’ve yet seen—it’s a Comet server that makes WebHook requests back to your regular application stack to check if a user has permission to publish or subscribe to a given channel. “The key insight is that all application development with hookbox happens either in JavaScript or in the native language of the web application itself”.
Easier custom Model Manager Chaining. A neat solution to the problem of wanting to write a custom QuerySet method (.published() for example) which is also available on that model’s objects manager, without having to write much boilerplate.
simplegeo’s python-oauth2. The Python OAuth library scene is frighteningly complicated at the moment. This seems to be the most actively maintained, and the readme includes working example code for talking to the Twitter API (including integration with Django auth).
MapOSMatic. Clever service built on top of OpenStreetMap, which renders double sided city maps with a map and grid on one size and an A-Z street name index on the other. Runs on top of Mapnik, PostGIS and Cairo, with a few thousand additional lines of Python and Django.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Django 1.2 release notes (via) Released today, this is a terrific upgrade. Multiple database connections, model validation, improved CSRF protection, a messages framework, the new smart if template tag and lots, lots more. I’ve been using the 1.2 betas for a major new project over the past few months and it’s been smooth sailing all the way.
Installing GeoDjango Dependencies with Homebrew. brew update && brew install postgis && brew install gdal
Introduction to Surlex. A neat drop-in alternative for Django’s regular expression based URL parsing, providing simpler syntax for common path patterns.
The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us. The Onion ported their main site from PHP and Drupal to Django in three months with a team of four developers, including a full migration of their archived content. Their developers answer questions about the switch in this thread on the Django sub-reddit.
Using Django as a Pass Through Image Proxy (via) Neat idea for running development environments against data copied from a live production site—a static file serving handler which uses a local cache but copies in user-uploaded files from the production site the first time they are requested.
Cache Machine: Automatic caching for your Django models. This is the third new ORM caching layer for Django I’ve seen in the past month! Cache Machine was developed for zamboni, the port of addons.mozilla.org to Django. Caching is enabled using a model mixin class (to hook up some post_delete hooks) and a custom caching manager. Invalidation works by maintaining a “flush list” of dependent cache entries for each object—this is currently stored in memcached and hence has potential race conditions, but a comment in the source code suggests that this could be solved by moving to redis.
Announcing django-cachebot. The ORM caching space around Django is heating up. django-cachebot is used in production at mingle.com and takes a more low level approach to cache invalidation than Johnny Cache, enabling you to specifically mark the querysets you wish to cache and providing some advanced options for cache invalidation. Unfortunately it currently relies on a patch to Django core to enable its own manager.
Is johnny-cache for you? “Using Johnny is really adopting a particular caching strategy. This strategy isn’t always a win; it can impact performance negatively”—but for a high percentage of Django sites there’s a very good chance it will be a net bonus.
jmoiron.net: Johnny Cache. The blog entry announcing Johnny Cache (“a drop-in caching library/framework for Django that will cache all of your querysets forever in a consistent and safe manner”) to the world.
Johnny Cache. Clever twist on ORM-level caching for Django. Johnny Cache (great name) monkey-patches Django’s QuerySet classes and caches the result of every single SELECT query in memcached with an infinite expiry time. The cache key includes a “generation” ID for each dependent database table, and the generation is changed every single time a table is updated. For apps with infrequent writes, this strategy should work really well—but if a popular table is being updated constantly the cache will be all but useless. Impressively, the system is transaction-aware—cache entries created during a transaction are held in local memory and only pushed to memcached should the transaction complete successfully.
Django Advent: Scaling Django. Mike Malone’s advice on scaling Django applications, including taking advantage of new features in 1.2.
jacobian’s django-deployment-workshop. Notes and resources from Jacob’s 3 hour Django deployment workshop at PyCon, including example configuration files for Apache2 + mod_wsgi, nginx, PostgreSQL and pgpool.
Django Advent. I can’t believe I haven’t linked to this already—Django Advent is “a series of articles about upcoming releases of the Django web framework”. Seven have been posted so far, covering topics from 1.2 including multi-db, messages, object permissions and natural keys.
Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes).
Presenting django-devserver, a better runserver. I really like this—it’s a Django management command (./manage.py rundevserver) which adds SQL logging and cache access summaries to the console output of Django’s local development server. It solves a similar set of problems to the debug toolbar, but requires slightly less setup and doesn’t inject additional HTML in to your pages. You can add your own custom modules to it as well.