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The article precisely says you should not pass the request to the models.

That doesn't make it any less of an antipattern. The "fat model" pattern is essentially "if you can't figure out where it goes, put it in the model." In the article's example, the credit card processing code is wrapped up into the quote model. I can't think of a single situation in which this is a good idea.

The "fat model" pattern is simply organising your logic and relationships into the model layer. How well you organise it is up to you. If you just dump things from the controllers into random parts of the model then that's your choice but there are plenty of ways to design it well.

I'm closely involved in a big system that uses Catalyst (perl's nearest equivalent to Django). We spend allmost all of our time in Model classes (MyDomain::Model::Whatever, not MyWebApp::Model::Whatever that's just a dumb connector). It works well and I get the shits every time I have to deal with code that doesn't separate this stuff out properly. Also works on the front end using modern javascript.

I have most of my logic in the views (because I didn't now any better when starting my project). I know the Django way suggests fat models (well I know that now). But is it honestly that big of a deal? I know in my app that any complex logic will be in the views. What will I gain by following these best practices?

Yeah, try having a fat controller or view, on a rapidly developing codebase with poor specs which change mid-project regularly while avoiding getting fired.

Sounds very like my work.

Yeah, schema changes are a pain in the arse, but I don't see that moving my code from views to models would have a great deal of impact (though I am gradually moving the code that way when it does need changed).

A better answer is, that you get to decouple the functionality of your application's business logic from the web portion. This is achieved trivially purely by applying disciplined coding standards. Removing the web dependency makes the code much much easier to write automated tests for, and it gives a sane development path when making minor or major changes to feature sets.

But the article passes other unrelated things to the models.

If it's a complex query of some sort, create a query repository that returns model objects rather than a "fat" static method on the model itself.

I believe that the "Django way" of doing that is to have a custom "Manager" class;

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/db/managers/#cu... http://zmsmith.com/2010/04/using-custom-django-querysets/

"the junk drawer for stuff that doesn't go anywhere else"

I really want to know where to put that stuff. Creating an object to put the "filterBlah" function that you only use once is overkill, so it sits there as a one-off method in your View or Controller or Model. I've worked with large enough code bases for long enough that I know there's always hacky junk there, and I'd just like to know more strategies for addressing it. Do large code bases have a strategy for putting the one-offs in a place where they are obvious and organizable?

I'm now working on a 5M line code base, and at that scale, you kind of have to put the code into acceptable, bad, worse and awful categories and come up with strategies to fix it. There IS no good code at this point. I've actually done refactoring with regexes, but I want better tools for reasoning about extremely large and weird code bases.

In rails filter functions like that are kept in the model. They're composable and lazily evaluated so you don't really end up with giant, one-off methods. In python I'd expect to find this sort of functionality in a service class (with each domain object having it's own service class).

you could simply use unbound functions which you put into a Python module which fits the bill. For example you could create a file services.py - or something more related to your actual domain.