Back in the Django saddle | Hacker News Reader

Back in the Django saddle

holovaty.com

212 pointsslig44 comments

It's great to hear that Django is moving to GitHub. It seems like the Python community has been slow to adopt git, perhaps because Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, and perhaps because GitHub uses Ruby. That said, it seems like git is emerging as the winner, and IMHO GitHub is far superior to anything available outside of git, so I'm glad they're making the move.

Indeed, this is good news - there have always been a pull request or two on the Django GitHub mirror that would need to be closed and redirected to the Django project bug tracker, where they would need to generate a patch. This always slowed contributions and made people who genuinely wanted to help jump through needless hoops.

heh, I myself started using HG partly because of language patriotism, partly because Bitbucket (running on Django) had a better offer than Github. yet one had to be out of his mind not to like Django moving to any of those providers. it's a great step. (a little tiny bit sad they didn't choose hg/bitbucket ;))

the move surprised me a bit, AFAIR when this topic (moving to a DVCS) was raised on DjangoCons, Russel explained that's not a priority (correct me if my memory fails).

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I would imagine Adrian's list of priorities represents just that -- the things he wants to work on.

Yes, that, plus the things that I think would be good for the framework and the community.

oh, great :)

forgot to link the hn post in comments on your blog, glad you came here so fast. cheerz

> It seems like the Python community has been slow to adopt git, perhaps because Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, and perhaps because GitHub uses Ruby.

For a lot of people in the Python world, choosing a DVCS just means picking what CPython picked (hg). At the time, that decision was at least partly due to the fact that git had poor Windows support, and less about the languages involved (GitHub/Ruby weren't a factor anyway since it would be a self-hosted git install).

If the decision was to be made again today, most people I've talked to think git would be the choice.

My experience is still that git is at best a second class citizen on windows, in terms of installation, performance and usability.

Is this no longer the case in some way?

I can't really speak to performance (I don't have any large projects where I could tell a difference), but the install is painless, and the windows git shell is really nice.

windows git performance on a 300KLOC, 8000+ file C++ project was IME very good - and that was 2-3 years ago. compared with g++, it was great.

I've been using msysgit at work for the past couple of years, and it works fine. There's a bit of an impedance mismatch between the command line orientation of git and the crippled command line experience on Windows, but msysgit comes with its own mini bash implementation, complete with ls, vi and a few other handy utilities.

I am most interested to see what the transition from SHA1 to PBKDF2[1][2] will mean for Django. I have wanted to just switch to bcrypt, but it's such a pain in the ass to manage on Windows and will probably break for users testing my projects locally.

It's not like SHA1 is tantamount to leaving the barn door open, but it doesn't sit well with me to stick with it, until it is replaced natively.

[1]: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.django.devel/332...

[2]: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15367

What is wrong with https://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/django-bcrypt/ ?

At least on Linux, I installed it and had no issue whatsoever.

There's nothing wrong with django-bcrypt. The main reason for picking PBKDF2 is because it can be implemented without pulling in a dependency to the core framework. The Django team does a lot of work to maintain backwards-compatability and smooth upgrades which is why having this in core is important to me.

Python (and Django) prides itself on being cross-platform. Installing bcrypt on Windows is a huge PITA.

But bcrypt is just a few files of portable C (the .S is optional) with no dependencies whatsoever ?

One thing that I think the Django core team needs to work on is documenting best practices. And I know that there are a bunch of different huge companies who build things in Django and all have different standards for how to develop and deploy, but just running

    $ django-admin.py startproject PROJECT
    $ cd PROJECT
    $ python manage.py startapp

is simply not cutting it.

I totally agree - having no standards around common problems (like how to deal with tests once they get too big for a single tests.py) is extremely inconvenient.

I thought the general solution to this was just to create a /tests directory and stuff everything in there, broken out as you wish?

Did I just make that up?

No that's basically how everyone does it. Same thing for models, views, etc. It's all python.

That's because Django, while monolithic, is in many ways based on pythonic principles.

In Ruby, for instance, you really need conventions as in Ruby the concept of packages and how they get included / used is a lot more relaxed.

In Python tests.py is a package as far as Python is concerned. If it gets too big you can make it a directory and break its contents in several sub-packages. I did this with everything else too, like views.py or models.py

The one concept Django has that I consider a flaw is in fact non-pythonic - apps. That's because apps are not just simple packages. Instead apps are packages that have to be specified in an INSTALLED_APPS constant in a top-level "settings" package. This makes using parts of Django in scripts a PITA, as your script needs an accompanying settings file. Also, apps are not properly defined either and in some instances an app must have a "models" subpackage (or at least this used to be the case).

I've always thought there has been dissonance between the remarkable amount of "this is how we did it at the paper" baked into the code and the libertarian "you should do what works for you" in the docs.

(What worked at the paper has always worked well for me, of course, but I've never been too adventurous about straying.)

You could ask for a refund. :) Otherwise you just might have to figure out how to do it yourself. That is how the world works fundamentally. You're actually lucky you're getting Django for free, providing so much functionality out-of-the-box. TANSTAAFL.

Why? Django (trunk) has new files layout.

    $ django-admin.py startproject testo 
    $ cd testo
    $ ./manage.py startapp testapp

    $ tree                                                                                                    
    .
    ├── manage.py
    ├── testapp
    │   ├── __init__.py
    │   ├── models.py
    │   ├── tests.py
    │   └── views.py
    └── testo
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── settings.py
        ├── urls.py
        └── wsgi.py

...You know, this actually makes a heck of a lot more sense. Hopefully they'll follow it up with some more docs on how you can develop with virtualenv and the like.

Welcome back, I am really interested to hear what "changes were made to the framework that [Adrian] would've prevented had [he] been more involved."

Really excited about the move to GitHub!

"... and changes were made to the framework that I would've prevented had I been more involved."

Such as?

What are the best practices for testing in Django? I feel silly testing my models. And testing my views also seems kind of awkward. But then there's nothing else to test.

Any advice?

This really depends on your situation. If you are writing a reusable app, then you probably want both unit tests and a sample project to run integration tests against.

For testing a basic website, you'll probably want to test any custom managers or model methods, and your views. A good guide to getting started is here: http://toastdriven.com/blog/2011/apr/10/guide-to-testing-in-...

For full-stack tests, you can use something like Splinter (http://splinter.cobrateam.info/).

I'm curious to see if any improvements to GeoDjango will be made in the near future...trying to decide if django is the right tool for an app with GIS capabilities.

Welcome back Adrian!

Good to hear that "this week in django" will be back.. but the podcast edition would be a great plus for the community.

Though not a Django user, I immediately wished this existed for a number of other frameworks/projects. What a great idea to keep people interested in the project.

I've tried several times but I just can't bring myself to enjoy using Django. I am a Pyramid/Pylons guy all the way.

This is why Django is so slow moving. People are not really spending time developing it. Thank goodness there is Bottle.py and Flask now.

Not that it couldn't move faster, and I'm all for more Python web frameworks, but Django has certainly made significant progress.

I suspect most people (that is, developers who use the framework but don't necessarily contribute to it) probably couldn't tell that a BDFL has basically been MIA - it doesn't feel like development's stopped altogether (although again, yes, it can obviously be sped up, everyone's got their own pet features, etc.)

Django and Flask aim to solve different types of problem.

I would argue that's not quite the case. So if they solve different problems you could hypothetically use them in the same projects? Possible, but hardly the case in real world scenarios.

You could certainly use Django or Flask to implement the same functionality, but I was trying to use the word "problem" in a wider sense than that.

In my real word scenarios I'm often faced with requirements of vastly different scale and highly variable deadlines. I also have to consider the likelihood of the code being added to in the future - potentially by someone else on my team who is less experienced by me. All these things taken together - and more - constitute what I am calling a "problem".

My Django apps all run to thousands of lines of code and are well documented and thoroughly tested. It's fairly routine for the lifecycle of these apps to stretch over years, with an ongoing requirement for maintenance and new features. If I need to create a social network for my company which ties into their existing information sources, then Django is where I start.

On the other hand, my Flask apps tend to run to the small hundreds of lines of code. They're usually hacked together quickly for a very specific use case and there's very little in the way of documentation. They might not even work correctly except in fairly limited circumstances (e.g. no time to write form validation code) and might get thrown away after being used a small number of times. If I need to create a tool to allow users to purge parts of our Varnish cache then Flask is where I start.

Perhaps not everybody uses the two frameworks in quite the same way, but I find that they complement each other well.

That's interesting. Now that you mention it, I've noticed my Flask apps run a much tighter LOC count. I always assumed that was because I was achieving the same solution but in a simpler way. In any case, I migrated to Flask because I'm much happier coding in it. My admin apps are blueprint css + some really simple views that take as much effort to write as I would be spending tweaking the Admin classes in Django. Maybe it's time to have a look at Django again, now that Holovaty is making a comeback eah? hehe.

Sure you could.

People use Sinatra AND Rails (the Ruby equivalents to Django/Flask) in the same project all the time.

GitHub for example uses Rails for the major functionality and Sinatra for REST apis and such.

Having attended the last couple of US iterations of Djangocon, being a close follower of the django-dev list, etc. that's not at all my interpretation. Also, spend a bit of time here: https://code.djangoproject.com/ and I don't see how you could come away with the impression that Django development is moribund.

And while I like Bottle and Flask, their aim is widely different from Django's.

Why should it move fast? Many excellent software don't move fast and are a please, think Vim or Putty. Moreover moving often means adding the last stuff en vogue, and it adds bloat and dependencies.

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