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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#131

Post by gtaylor »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #59
true_religion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rediculous. Everyone's app is different, and so Django is rightly agnostic as to how your settings are stored, and which are loaded. As for the scope of the problem: dealing with multiple development settings is Section 1, Page 1 of professional programming. It's a solved and trivial problem. This isn't like coding your own ORM or templating language.

Okay, let me rephrase. It's not trivial. In rails, it's trivial. The framework has knowledge of these separate states of applications. Deploying a serious, hardened service on top of Django is an order of magnitude more complicated than something like Rails. Schema migrations are yes, a "solved" problem, if by "solved" you mean a third party application that isn't baked into the framework. Having built a service that…

This whole comment is rife with ignorance.

> Deploying a serious, hardened service on top of Django is an order of magnitude more complicated than something like Rails.

That's funny. How so? I just start gunicorn, point nginx at it, and I'm ready to go. Of course, you could just as easily do it 500 other ways that might make sense to you more.

> Schema migrations are yes, a "solved" problem, if by "solved" you mean a third party application that isn't baked into the framework.

This is absolutely the most absurd thing you've said so far. South handles migrations very well, the code of of excellent quality, and I'm always thrilled to see incremental improvements come down the pipe when they're ready. I don't have to wait for a new Django release.

> Having built a service that hosts Django apps, I can tell you that serious, hardened, services are not as trivial as you think to build with Django. There are countless headaches, and at this point it makes sense to use Rails over Django if you care about making your life easy.

Completely unsupported drivel. We run two separate PCI compliant websites with well over 10k uniques a day per, and have had a pretty easy time of securing both. Django bakes in XSS and a lot of other protection with little to no effort. SQL injection attacks become all but impossible if you don't do anything goofy.

> I'm not saying Django isn't without its advantages, but those advantages tend to pale in comparison to some of the problems when you scale past 10 users of a trivial app like a blog.

Work we do for client spans in the many thousands of users. Django bears the load well, has kept ourselves and our clients safe for over four years now, and lets us develop and deliver quickly.

I'm sure you can do the same for RoR, but why dump on Django when you clearly don't have a firm grasp on it and/or Python?

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#133

Post by Yxven »

The strongest part about django has always been (imo) it's documentation. The books that are out currently are simply not as good as the docs on the main site. I suspect this is the main reason there are not new books. If no one is buying django books, why write new ones?

The only dig I've read here that I agree with is that the plugins vary wildly in quality and ease of use. I would suspect that's true of ror as well. (Although, I think they have more to choose from, so there's probably more diamonds in the rough)

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#134

Post by geekam »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

From where I see, Django has a decent community. I have been helped a lot, I regularly go to meetups with a turnout of 20+ Django devs at a time.

Django is a Python framework. It has some nice features of Python like explicitness over implicitness rather than depending on a lot of magic. But in no way I feel it is a clumsy, inflexible or restrictive.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#136

Post by Daishiman »

mtogo wrote: post #38
c4urself wrote: post #26

tl;dr; (Not meant as a smart-ass comment but...) they're busy building stuff. I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. I believe this has to do with Python itself and the great docs on Djangoproject.com Just start doing the tutorial and voila. This has introduced a large amount of new programmers to Django and Python, making it gain…

I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. Wait, you're kidding right? Django is positively horrible for beginning programmers because it's a gigantic framework with an insane learning curve, and if you haven't done much/any webdev before it's almost impossible to learn. Sure, you and i can pick it up in a weekend, but i don't think it…

I taught someone programming with Python and Django. 6 months later he has a job at a bioinformatics startup.

Python is dead easy to teach and Django is dead easy to apply for newbies.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#137

Post by ubernostrum »

endtime wrote: post #123
mdasen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be defending the OP's position, but. . . settings.py is a mess. Even Simon's written a post bashing it ( http://simonwillison.net/2009/may/19/djng/ ). I cringe a little starting up a project and having to dive into the settings.py file. In some ways, Django tries to be flexible, but it's clumsy. For example, you can have your templates in your app directories. So, you have /path/to/project/posts/templ…

>However, migrations are a tad fundamental. FYI, I think the South authors are the ones preventing South being part of Django, not the Django maintainers.

Honestly?

I don't think either "side" (if there is such a thing as "sides" here -- South's lead developer has a commit bit on Django) wants to just transplant South into Django directly. The plan, which got hashed out secretly behind closed doors in a shadowy back room (on our public mailing list), is to work the low-level support for migration-ish stuff -- APIs for DB manipulation, etc. -- into Django, but not officially "bless" any particular high-level implementation.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#138

Post by dimmuborgir »

ulvund wrote: post #5

List of communities: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Communit... Mailing lists: https://www.djangoproject.com/community/ on the right Sizes of communities: reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/django - 4,181 readers http://www.reddit.com/r/rails - 1,994 readers http://www.reddit.com/r/rubyonrails - 921 readers Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/django 20k tagged http://stackoverfl…

To be honest, Reddit has always been a Python stronghold. (may be because Reddit itself is written in Python)

And if it wasn't for the excellent http://railsforum.com, Rails could have got several thousands more tags on Stackoverflow.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#139

Post by batiste »

ehutch79 wrote: post #127
tghw wrote: post #3

I think part of the difference is that the Django docs are just so good, there isn't a lot I can think of that a book would add. DjangoSnippets.org is also pretty useful, as are the multitudes of Django apps available on GitHub and BitBucket. You can also hang out in #django on freenode. People can sometimes be a bit gruff with noobs (though what IRC channel isn't) but there are usually some good discussions going on…

The django docs arn't as good as they're made out to be, at least not any more. The major problem is they're lagging behind at this point, in both using the new core features such as class based views, and in best practices, such as the tutorial teaching reusable apps. the core devs have said this themselves though on stage at cons, so i'm sure it'll get fixed at some point.

The lack of documentation for class based view is quite annoying! How can they release a feature without at least a few lines?

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#140

Post by zeemonkee »

mdasen wrote: post #90
philipn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is Django clumsy, inflexible or restrictive?

I don't want to be defending the OP's position, but. . . settings.py is a mess. Even Simon's written a post bashing it ( http://simonwillison.net/2009/may/19/djng/ ). I cringe a little starting up a project and having to dive into the settings.py file. In some ways, Django tries to be flexible, but it's clumsy. For example, you can have your templates in your app directories. So, you have /path/to/project/posts/templ…

Unlike the troll at the top of the thread, there are some fair comments here. It's maddening when the maintainers shrug and say more or less "well, that's the way it's going to be".

My pet hate is contrib.auth - the models used feel seriously out of date and the whole get_profile() thing feels inefficient and hacky. Almost every client I work with does not want usernames but email login these days and I have to use the same damn workarounds each time. I get the feeling there were some bad decisions made early on in the project - maybe to work around the lack of model inheritance back then - and they've stuck, but still somehow need to be defended.

And yes, for crying out loud, South needs to be part of Django itself. This "we shouldn't have opinions" is a crock. Everyone who needs migrations uses South. When we don't have South but we have a highly opinionated - and practically useless - comments app, that argument doesn't hold water.

Like yourself, though, most of the time Django does what I need, I can make it work, and love 90% of it - the ORM, forms, middleware etc "fit my brain" and work nicely. But the framework still needs a lot of work and some serious wart removal.

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