Neural Advance

Since my last post I’ve spent some time looking at all the options available to Django developers. There are a vast array of different approaches one can take and the frameworks included in the core distribution are pretty solid and well documented.

I am aware of the Pinax project which offers lots of already written Django modules but I checked fairly recently and they were still behind the Django releases by quite a margin. Whilst the project looks good and I will certainly be keeping an eye on it, I don’t think I would make use of it in a serious project. Especially considering some of the changes in Django 1.2 are so good.

One element of Django that I overlooked when initially going through the documentation was the generic views feature. At first glance this seems like either a redundant feature or one that is better used as a small prototyping feature but after closer inspection it is obvious that this is an extremely powerful tool. The fact that you can delegate the entire view code to the main Django distribution not only simplifies your application but also reduces the number of potential bugs that your application contains.

Simply put any page that either displays a list of objects of a certain model type or a single object of a certain model type is ripe for use with the generic page view feature. Thus all you need to do is implement a template and that will handle how the view is displayed, all the correct data will automatically be passed to the template for you.

The next important tool to talk about is the built in comment framework. This simplifies the process of allowing users to post comment against articles and the like. The first time I used Django I actually wrote a simple blog application that implemented this feature itself but while it was a little more flexible the comment framework is stable, well documented and maintained by more developers. Any failings of the comment framework are going to be offset by the increased time spent fixing bugs in your own implementation and possibly a poor design in the first place.

The only complaint I have is the somewhat simplistic moderation system that is currently in place. It does the trick, but is not exactly a killer feature.

The final thing I want to talk about is the cache framework and memcached. I was impressed when I saw that the cache framework included not only a site wide setting but one which allowed caching on a per view basis. This could potentially allow you some interesting possibilities to optimise certain parts of your site say during a Slashdot stampede while the rest of the site remains untouched. My only concern would be that the control does not extend to the object level as far as I can see. It certainly allows you access to a low level cache API which allows the caching of data when you need it but it would be nicer to have something to automatically cache an object given a certain set of parameters.

Anyway this has been my first post reflecting my initial exploration of the framework. I’m keen to keep going as Django really seems the perfect mix of simplicity and flexibility. Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks.