Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eighteen months of Django

dangoldin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 85 posts

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#41

Post by obviouslygreen »

chrisdl wrote: post #39
tacticus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a stupid question about virtualenv for you. Why does it default to full paths for everything?

I actually don't "know" either. But I suspect it has to do with knowing which python to use (system generally) and if the user wants to use global packages as well. checkout virtualenvwrapper ( http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/install.h... ) as well for handling virtualenvs.

+1, I definitely should have mentioned this. virtualenvwrapper makes it vastly more convenient.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#42

Post by obviouslygreen »

crdoconnor wrote: post #37
obviouslygreen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that periodic execution, one of the more useful aspects of celery, is not supported on all backends. If you're using rabbitMQ, you're golden. If you're using most or all other transports (including SQS), you're likely SOL and will have to resort to either bare cron jobs or something like django-cronograph that accomplishes the same thing. celery is definitely nice, but it does have its limitations (like everythi…

This is good to know. I've just started using it with redis. I never really saw the point of that part of celery anyway. Cron's perfectly adequate on its own (and installed just about everywhere).

The nice thing about it from our point of view is the ability to keep everything in source control. Granted, you can keep your cron jobs as scripts, but celery+rabbitMQ allows you to keep it all in Python without the extra deployment step. It's not a huge deal, but it does help a bit with maintainability and getting new devs up to speed.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#43

Post by bluepanda_ »

Interesting post. I decided to use Django for our startup because Python was a requirement, we're planning to have a lot of customers, and Django seems like the most appropriate choice for large scale apps. While I've mostly used non-rel databases, I'll be using postgresql as a database, because it seems to be highly compatible with Django, because Heroku makes scaling it easy, and because it's a good occasion to learn some RDBMS.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#44

Post by crdoconnor »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #42
crdoconnor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good to know. I've just started using it with redis. I never really saw the point of that part of celery anyway. Cron's perfectly adequate on its own (and installed just about everywhere).

The nice thing about it from our point of view is the ability to keep everything in source control. Granted, you can keep your cron jobs as scripts, but celery+rabbitMQ allows you to keep it all in Python without the extra deployment step. It's not a huge deal, but it does help a bit with maintainability and getting new devs up to speed.

We keep all the deployment stuff in source control anyway. For me, it would just mean shifting it from being declared by salt in the "infrastructure" folder to being written in python in the django folder.

I agree that you should keep the code itself in python, but that can be handled just by making it a management command that gets called by cron.

Sysadmins understand and love cron, too. I think celery reinventing the wheel might make some of them a bit mad.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#45

Post by boffo9 »

mailshanx wrote: post #40
aidos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither! Actually, as the others have said it completely depends on what you're making. Django is great if you're making a standard cms type website. News feed, blog, etc. There's a bit of a learning curve but it gives you a lot of the scaffolding out of the box (and there are loads of examples to learn from). It has the biggest community (I guess?) so you'll always be able to find answers / libraries / sample code.…

What is your opinion about web2py? I started exploring it a week back, and it seems to have a lot of built in functionality. I thought it would be the easiest web framework to get started with (since it was originally built to help teach students about web programming). However, it seems to have a vast number of components, and it looks like learning all of it would entail almost the same effort as learning Django...

Web2py does badly with pycharm. So I don't use it.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#46

Post by ceol »

crdoconnor wrote: post #38
thejosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using celery for the first time, coming from PHP-land, blew my mind. Python is now my language of choice for "getting shit done".

Returning to PHP land afterwards feels like you're taping your code together with duct tape and bits of string.

At the risk of this becoming a "bash PHP" thread, that's exactly how I feel. Unless I'm doing something very simple, it's always easier, cleaner, and simpler to do it in Python. Even building a basic CRUD app is night and day between the two languages; Django is beautiful and intuitive, while the PHP frameworks come close but have a few snags that make working with them frustrating.

I write this not to meaninglessly bash PHP but to hopefully convince even a single developer passing by to try out Python. I thought the same thing as you, passer-by dev, once: "Why do I need Python? It's stupid. It uses whitespace weirdly. I can do whatever I need in PHP." But then you realize you could be doing everything you're doing in PHP... better, smarter, and faster.

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#49

Post by ceol »

mailshanx wrote: post #40
aidos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither! Actually, as the others have said it completely depends on what you're making. Django is great if you're making a standard cms type website. News feed, blog, etc. There's a bit of a learning curve but it gives you a lot of the scaffolding out of the box (and there are loads of examples to learn from). It has the biggest community (I guess?) so you'll always be able to find answers / libraries / sample code.…

What is your opinion about web2py? I started exploring it a week back, and it seems to have a lot of built in functionality. I thought it would be the easiest web framework to get started with (since it was originally built to help teach students about web programming). However, it seems to have a vast number of components, and it looks like learning all of it would entail almost the same effort as learning Django...

Not the person you replied to, but my two cents.

The creator and lead developer, Massimo Di Pierro, is incredibly active and always willing to lend a hand with whatever problem you have. I've seen him around reddit (not sure if he's on HN) and even when he's met with the inevitable haters, he's always been friendly and cordial.

Just like you've said, web2py was originally made to teach people how to build websites, which really shows in its architecture. It forgoes traditional Python conventions ("explicit is better than implicit" being a major one) in order to be more beginner-friendly. Some of the more experienced developers find this annoying, but if you're coming from PHP or a fresh background, it can be much easier to get started. Just take a look at the overview on Wikipedia[0]. It gives a good outline.

This is coming from someone who doesn't even use web2py. I prefer Flask for personal projects and Django for work/group things, but I would whole-heartedly recommend web2py. Run through the book[1] and, if you don't like it, give the Django tutorial[2] a shot. If that doesn't mesh with you, there's Flask[3], Pyramid[4], TurboGears[5], and CherryPy[6]. (The last two I would not recommend for beginners, but they're still good!)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web2py#Overview

[1]: http://web2py.com/book

[2]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/intro/tutorial01/

[3]: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/

[4]: http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/en/1.4-branch...

[5]: http://turbogears.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[6]: http://docs.cherrypy.org/stable/index.html

Re: Eighteen months of Django

#50

Post by porker »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #23
tesmar2 wrote: post #2

As someone who is thinking about doing a python project, should I learn Django or just go with Flask? Any thoughts on those two?

Flask is so simple that it's definitely worth picking that up regardless (in any case, I think it's well done and worth having in your arsenal). However, for large web projects, Django beats it hands down. Doing similar work with Flask would require so much wheel-reinvention that it'd be hard to justify your time or your client's money when it's all built quite well already. Of course it's not perfect, and it's not f…

Good point, I'd not thought about the JVM based Ruby solutions which can be used. If they'd give more Scala-like performance..

IronPython?

Post reply on HN