565 items tagged “django”
The Django web framework.
2009
South’s Design. Andrew Godwin explains why South resorts to parsing your models.py file in order to construct information about for creating automatic migrations.
Contextual (via) I’ve been trying to figure out a sane way to replace Django’s settings.py global module with something that’s designed to be reconfigured at run-time. Contextual appears to be trying to solve exactly that problem.
mmalone’s django-caching. Mike Malone shares code used by Pownce to add QuerySet level caching to Django. It’s a smart implementation—a CachingQuerySet class inspects the arguments passed to get(), and if they’re just a straight forward exact PK lookup hits memcache for the object before hitting the database. Signals are used to invalidate the cache.
ericflo’s django-tokyo-sessions. A Django sessions backend using Tokyo Cabinet, via Tokyo Tyrant and the PyTyrant library. A fast key/value store is a much better solution for sessions than a relational database.
hash_ring 1.2. A Python library for consistent hashing with memcached, using MD5 and the same algorithm as libketama. Exposes an interface that is identical to regular memcache making this a drop-in replacement.
djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in.
django-piston. Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.
REST worst practices. Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ thoughts on the characteristics of a well designed Django REST API library, from November 2008.
python-sqlparse (via) Python library for re-identing SQL statements. This could make debugging Django’s generated SQL a whole lot easier. You can try the library out using an App Engine hosted application (complete with an API).
Haystack (via) A brand new modular search plugin for Django, by Daniel Lindsley. The interface is modelled after the Django ORM (complete with declarative classes for defining your search schema) and it ships with backends for both Solr and pure-python Whoosh, with more on the way. Excellent documentation.
Reducing XSS by way of Automatic Context-Aware Escaping in Template Systems (via) The Google Online Security Blog reminds us that simply HTML-escaping everything isn’t enough—the type of escaping needed depends on the current markup context, for example variables inside JavaScript blocks should be escaped differently. Google’s open source Ctemplate library uses an HTML parser to keep track of the current context and apply the correct escaping function automatically.
django-shorturls. Jacob took my self-admittedly shonky shorter URL code and turned it in to a proper reusable Django application.
rev=canonical bookmarklet and designing shorter URLs
I’ve watched the proliferation of URL shortening services over the past year with a certain amount of dismay. I care about the health of the web and try to ensure that URLs I am responsible will last for as long as possible, and I think it’s very unlikely that all of these new services will still be around in twenty years time. Last month I suggested that the Internet Archive start mirroring redirect databases, and last week I was pleased to hear that Archiveteam, a different organisation, had already started crawling.
[... 920 words]Scaling Django web apps on Apache. Cool to see this kind of article cropping up on IBM developerWorks, but it’s a shame they don’t mention mod_wsgi.
How to use Django with Apache and mod_wsgi. My favourite deployment option is now included in the official Django docs, thanks to Alex Gaynor. I tend to run a stripped down Apache with mod_wsgi behind an nginx proxy, and have nginx serve static files directly. This avoids the need for a completely separate media server (although a separate media domain is still a good idea for better client-side performance).
Southerly Breezes. Andrew Godwin is slowly assimilating the best ideas from other Django migration systems in to South—the latest additions include ORM Freezing from Migratory and automatic change detection. Exciting stuff.
django-gae2django. An implementation of the Google App Engine API (datastore, memcache, urlfetch, users and mail) that runs on Django, allowing you to take an existing application written for App Engine and deploy it on your own server on top of Django.
It’s time for a change. Jacob Kaplan-Moss is joining Revolution Systems, who will now be offering professional Django support “to companies who need a Django expert on staff, but can’t afford someone full-time.”
Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag.
Chris Beaven's drop-in replacement for Django's {% if %} tag that adds comparison operators (less than, greater than, not equal etc) while staying backwards compatible with the less able original. I love it. This is one place where I no longer favour Django's stated philosophy: I think it's perfectly reasonable to use comparisons in presentation logic, and I've found that in my own code the lack of an advanced if tag frequently leads to pure presentation logic sneaking in to my view functions.
django-springsteen and Distributed Search. Will Larson’s Django search library currently just talks to Yahoo! BOSS, but is designed to be extensible for other external search services. Interestingly, it uses threads to fire off several HTTP requests in parallel from within the Django view.
FAPWS3-0.2 (WSGI server based on libev). Another strong contender for Python’s answer to Mongrel—3500 requests/s for static files, 43 for a simple dynamic (Django powered) pages and 4.8 for a heavy SQL query—all benchmarked with 300 concurrent requests.
DB2 support for Django is coming. From IBM, under the Apache 2.0 License. I’m not sure if this makes it hard to bundle it with the rest of Django, which uses the BSD license.
Announcing django-viewtools. A really excellent idea—run ./manage.py viewtools --pdb /path/on/site/ to debug a view in your Django project that is raising an error using the Python debugger, or use --profile to run the full request cycle for that URL through the profiler.
The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac. Will Larson’s impressively comprehensive guide to configuring and securing an Ubuntu VPS from scratch to run Django, using PostgreSQL and Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx.
EuroDjangoCon 2009. Tickets are now on sale for the conference, scheduled for 4th-6th of May (not March as I originally said) in Prague (followed by two days of development sprints).
Django Settings Tip—Setting Relative Paths. This is the first thing I do in every single one of my Django projects—it makes projects relocatable to other machines with just a couple of lines of code. I wouldn’t be at all upset to see it added to the default Django settings.py file created by ./manage.py startproject
solango. Another attempt at a Django/Solr integration library, based on code written for “a top 20 newspaper site” (I’d love to know which one). This is well documented, uses a registration model clearly inspired by the Django admin which keeps search related metadata out of your regular models and includes management commands for re-indexing and generating Solr schema.xml files.
Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites. Leonard’s thoughts on what the next generation of web frameworks should aim to provide.
Changeset 9793: SMTP testing documentation. I didn’t know this trick: running “python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025” will start up a simple SMTP server which dumps received e-mails to the terminal instead of forwarding them on.
EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February.