A Look at Django from a New Users Perspective
For the last couple of weeks I have been using Django to build a website I have been meaning to work on for quite some time. I thought I would post some of my impressions of the web framework as a new user to it in the hope that someone finds it useful. I’ll save the reasons why I chose Python and Django for another post.
The first thing that I noticed was the conceptual simplicity of the Django framework. I have become accustomed to frameworks which are ridiculously complicated compared to the goal that they are actually trying to achieve. So complex in fact that instead of looking good, the authors just end up looking stupid for getting so caught up in themselves. Java and C# frameworks seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to this phenomenon.
Setting up views and mapping URLs to those views is also extremely easy and the code that then loads a template from within said view is not going to be more than a couple of line (unless you are passing a ridiculous number of variables to the template system). This enables you to setup some complex views with a bare minimum of code. Another winning feature in my mind is the ease of producing JSON output. Whilst this is a feature of the Python standard library, querying the database and then immediately parsing it into JSON format for consumption by clients or indeed your own Javascript code on your website enables you to create complex web services with the bare minimum of fuss.
One of the features I need most when it comes to web frameworks is an easy way develop the application. Some web development tools require some rather complex setup to test on your own development server but I have found Django to be amazingly simple on this front. One technique I use is to set it up to use an SQLite 3 database on the local machine and test there whilst in the process of actual development and then transfer everything to the development server, change the database settings to a PostgreSQL database server, sync the database and then test the code to make sure that everything works as expected. This has lead to a much faster and easier to manage development cycle for me as I do not have to have my development server running (for PostgreSQL and Apache) in order to test the website. Instead I simply rely on the integrated development server provided by the manage.py script.
The integration of Markdown within the Django framework also allows you to let users create rich text in comments, forum posts and messages to one another which will certainly be appreciated by them. The only slight annoyance I have with it is that you can not limit the allowed markdown syntax which means that users can post comments in a header one style which potentially ruins your SEO for a given page.
Django’s project management features are pretty good too. I tend to use BBEdit on Mac OS X for my web app development and using that applications project management along with the separation of different parts of the web application by Django ensures that you never get overwhelmed by a bunch of random files that you need to remember their purpose. This makes it easy to develop modular parts of your site (a comment system for instance) independently of the parts which will actually make use of the comment system.
Web services, as I have said earlier, are the bread and butter of Django. It is rare nowadays for any serious website to only have web browser clients. Most offer some form of integration with desktop and mobile clients.
Overall I’m highly impressed with both Django and Python as a language. As this is the first real project that I have used it in it has been an eye opener. The Python standard library complements Django perfectly and being able to use the wealth of third party Python libraries available makes just about any conceivable task that you may have easy.
So what are you waiting for? Try it out. If you have any questions leave a comment and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
Note:
I started writing this article using Django 1.1.1 but since then Django 1.2 has been released. I have not had time to test the new release properly but some of the new additions certainly look good and a couple of small issues I had have been fixed. So upgrade if you can.
I’ve found that Python is perfect mainly because of how easily it does a lot of things well. I mean, you have things like ReportLab to do PDF’s, something like Psyco to speed up algorithmic work, NLTK for Natural Language analysis, StatPy for statistical computing… need I go on? I mean, hell, you can even make a standalone, web browser based desktop app with something like PyInstaller and Django! Madness!
Python + Django (or even Pylons) + the many different 3rd party Python packages = bliss
Yep I agree. Plus you have the flexibility to write a Python module in C if you really need the extra performance (which is something that might end up being very useful to me in the very near future).
I’ve really only scratched the surface with the number of Python libraries available at the moment.