Python Rocks! and other rants

Weblog of Kent S Johnson

#74 2007-02-14 10:45:06

New Job

I am pleased to say that I have a new job as a Python programmer! I am very happy at the prospect of full-time Python work. I will be working at home for a tiny startup in Chelmsford. The application is a Python web site that will be built in Django. There is also a substantial data collection and analysis piece which should be interesting as well.

Also I will be working on a Mac instead of Windows, another big plus.

:-)))

#73 2007-02-14 10:13:18

Django rocks

I recently tried out TurboGears and Django for a small project at work. Here are some impressions.

I tried TurboGears first. I really wanted to like TurboGears. I like the concept - find best-of-breed parts, add a little glue to make them work together, stir gently and enjoy. Don't re-invent the wheel. I often do the same thing in my work.

Unfortunately the reality is not so simple. For one thing, the "best-of-breed" seems to change. In TurboGears 1.0, the recommended ORM is SQLObject and the recommended template engine is Kid. But for TG 1.1, this will change to SQLAlchemy and Genshi. This gave me an uneasy feeling that TG is a moving target.

Then there are the TurboGears docs. For information about TG itself, you go to the TG website. These docs are kind of patchy, they don't feel comprehensive at all, more like a collection of recipes. For the component packages like SQLObject, you have to go to the component web site. (I know, there is a TG book. I bought a copy but I switched to Django before it arrived so I don't have anything to say about it.)

In the end TurboGears feels like a patchwork, pieced together out of whatever was near at hand.

OK, what about Django? Simply put, Django rocks! It is an integrated whole. The Django docs are clear and well organized. Most chapters of the upcoming book are online; they give a good overview of Django and dig into a lot of the details. The complete reference fills in the rest.

The functionality available in Django's admin site is phenomenal. The application I was playing with was very simple; take the data in an Excel spreadsheet and convert it to a web interface. The only code I had to write to do this was the Django model and an importer to populate the database. The rest was just configuration, and not much of that. The result is an application with a column view of the database with sortable columns, multiple filters, drill-down by date and a detail view and data entry screen. All basically for free. Oh, it looks great, too. My co-workers were blown away and they are planning to clean up my prototype and deploy it.

I'm convinced.