Reinout van Rees writes conference talk summaries and notes on Django, Python, PostgreSQL, and web development practice.
HN commenters link his summaries of talks, such as Kenneth Reitz on Flask versus Django and Mozilla's large Django sites, as scannable alternatives to slides.
> Back in the day, I remember writing reddit comments and blog posts to explain the relative popularity of Rails over Catalyst. It was usually along the lines of, "people want to be told what to do. given a screw, they would rather bash it in with a hammer than to read about what a screwdriver is." Posts like this reinforce that point: people don't use Rails because they want to use Rails, people use it because they're afraid of anything else. Rails gave them everything that they thought they needed, and no easy way to back out of the defaults. It was a comfortable world where you could never do something wrong. Now that Rails is becoming a meta-framework like Catalyst, people are being driven away because they have to think before they program, and they have to customize Rails into the framework they want instead of just using the framework that dhh wants.
Just the other day I was writing a similar piece about Django on my blog. Back in the day it used to be damn-simple to start a Django project (compared to starting a Zope project, for example). Download the thing, change a line or two in settings.py, and you were done. No need to worry about what ORM was Django using or about how some people thought that the templateing system was un-pythonic. Things just worked.
Now I see that more and more people decry the fact that Django is not "modular" enough or that you cannot change its default ORM with any other one just by editing one line of code. Guess what? Your boss or the…
Check this list out, Running Python - Django [1][3][4]:
-Instagram[0]
-Disqus
Disqus.com - Disqus serves over 3 billion page views, and more than 500 million unique visitors a month on it's Django stack. As far as we know we are the largest installation out there.
-Mozilla[2]
addons.mozilla.com and support.mozilla.com
250k+ add-ons, 150 million views per month, 500+ million api hits per day (firefox checking for updates!
-Justin.tv(they moved to Django from Rails)[3]
-NASA
-National Geographic
-Canonical
-Bitbucket.org
-Discovery Networks
-Intel, AMD, HP, IBM
-Lexis-Nexis
-The Library of Congress
-The New York Times
-Orbitz
-PBS
-Rdio: Huge traffic Radio site.
-VMWare
-Walt Disney
-The Washington Post.
-lanyrd.com
-OSQA Sites.
OSQA is an Open Sourced similar copy of Stackoverflow, a QnA community. AFAIK some 5K sites are powered by OSQA Stack. OSQA is built on Django.
-Youtube, LinkedIN, Google, NetFlix, Amazon: Python Stacks.
-GMail, Google Calendar, AdSense, AdWords, Android MarketPlace to name a few of the heavy hitters from Google are on Python - Google App Engine.
[0]http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/12/how-to-scale-a-1-billion-startup-a-guide-from-instagram-co-founder-mike-krieger/
[1]http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community/django-community-2012/
[2]http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-sites.html
References-
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886221/does-django-scale
[4]…
> Is the Django Book ready to use as it is to learn Django? The Django docs I think are not enough for someone starting out learning their first web framework(they seem to go deep right away and don't provide a structured way of learning).
It's pretty outdated by now, so you'll likely spend more time checking the differences (i.e. class based views). Same goes for Practical Django Projects[3].
You're best off looking at some online tutorials, another Django Book[1], or thinking of something to build and approaching it from scratch. Django's docs are very good, and there's a lot of open source projects out there that have likely accomplished something similar.
PS: I'm disappointed Reinout van Rees book was canned[2]
[1]: https://github.com/mariuz/django-book
[2]: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2012/05/23/djangobook-schluss.html
[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Django-Projects-Experts-Development/dp/1430219386/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
There are lots of people that agree with you: http://www.plope.com/Members/chrism/pythonic
I preferred what Ian Bicking wrote in response: http://blog.ianbicking.org/unzen-of-unpython.html
One thing I like about the Django community is that part of Djangocon specifically features critics who are invited to criticize Django or some aspect of it, for example:
"Why Django Sucks and how we can fix it"
http://blip.tv/djangocon/why-django-sucks-and-how-we-can-fix-it-4131303
Flasky Goodness (or Why Django Sucks?)
http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2012/06/06/flask-django-sucks.html
That's much better and productive than circling the wagons and letting personal insults fly.
There's some info here: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2010/05/25/django-technical-design.html
Question: What are the plans for python 3?
We haven’t made any plans for 2017 yet. We’re slowly dropping older releases. Probably python 2.4 sticks around in django 1.3, though. There has been work done on a python 3 port. Apparently the tests already run, though only 60% succeed. He considered 50% already a huge success, so they (=students at a canadian university, if I heard correcly) did a good job. Python 3 support will depend on an influx of new developers.
(I’d guess this doesn’t seriously mean that a Py3k port won’t be done until 2017.)
MDN is written in Django: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma. The add-ons site also uses Django. http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-sites.html
They have around 15 django libraries on GitHub as well https://github.com/mozilla?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=django