Massive Django newsapp rolled out in 24hours: Part One | Hacker News Reader

Massive Django newsapp rolled out in 24hours: Part One

andymboyle.com

41 pointstaylorbuley12 comments

great description of the development process for a small web app. I think there should be more stories like this - too many developers seem to compress their work into "tutorial form", which doesn't give any insight into the difficulty involved or mistakes made along the way.

Good work like this getting done in small- and medium-sized newsrooms all around the country thanks to frameworks like Django and the work-at-all-hours ethos that reporters and developers tend to share. Kudos for taking the time to do the writeup.

Deleted comment

Nah, I know PHP frameworks exist. I've just never used them. The last time I tried to use CodeIgniter it made me want to cry. I'm not smart enough for that stuff stuff. Plus I've been using Django for about two years. It only made sense, don't you think?

Thanks for your comments, though, folks!

WTF??? Why does this guy hate PHP and its frameworks? He is obviously a n00b who has never tried Drupal or its easy-to-install open-source modules, which, BTW, include picture modules for him to upload the portrait photos to. It's amazing that this ignorance still abounds in the era where Google and Experts-Exchange provide easy access to technical resources and insight...#FAIL

I find these sensitivities quite amusing.

I use Java, PHP, Django, GAE, Zope and have done some Rails development too. I happen to prefer the Python-based stacks because they are very elegant and don't have the irregular syntax that bothers me on Ruby (and that Rails exploits).

And yes, from all these, PHP is the one technology that has the ugliest syntax and the most ill-conceived ideas I have ever seen this side of FORTRAN 77. Very competent people write very elegant PHP code, but a lot of people who should never been allowed to use a text editor also write a lot of PHP code that should have never seen the light of day.

Your criticism fits the clueless developer stereotype so well, in fact, that hadn't you written several posts in this line, I would have dismissed this one as a failed attempt at humor.

So, here is my advice: PHP is not the end-all web language. Nor is Ruby and Rails. Learn more stuff. Learn, not only Rails, but Ruby - and do so deeply. Learn Perl. Understand RDBMSs are not the only way to save data and why text files may be a better idea. Also, try to do the SICP path (there are very good video lectures free to download and the book is available in HTML, ePub and PDF formats). You'll emerge a better programmer.

See you on the other side.

Drupal's coded in Erlang, right?

In all seriousness, your snarky criticism of PHP is unfair. Like Django does for Python, there are plenty of great PHP frameworks that provide design templates, ORM, and ready-made admin.

If you read my comment down below, I already address most of this. I know they exist. I just haven't used them, and thus wouldn't be that proficient. And thus to use them for this project would've been silly, as I'm not skilled at them. Don't you agree?

That and I already had a server set up that could take a lot of traffic, whereas our PHP servers? Not so much. So, for me, Django was the right decision. PHP has been the right decision for other projects, though. Just not this one.

No, that is false. And if you weren't able to figure out Drupal, you should've at least tried Rails. It sounds like it would do everything that you describe, but more efficiently.

Danno12, there's a fairly sizable Django community in media because the software was developed by a newspaper's tech staff (the Lawrence Journal-World). There's some good Rails development happening too, with the NY Time, ProPublica and others.

Actually, I've decided that ProPublica's approach is pretty weak by comparison. There are other shops doing it much better.

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