Hacking for fun and profit

It has been more than a month since I blogged about Django, the “Web Framework for perfectionists with deadlines”, and the more I use it, the more I know it is the right choice for my web development needs. There is a lot of activity in the project’s trac (this is more important IMHO than activity in the mailing lists ;-)

Some of the big improvements in the last weeks are:

• Internationalization support: both in code and templates.using gettext under the hood.
• A release: Django 0.9 was released this month, this should help people without subversion (or people that don’t know how to use it) installing django.
• More documentation: The documentation has been extended and improved. It is still incomplete, but it is of extremely high quality, probably one of the open source projects with the nicest documentation I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.
• RSS/Atom syndication framework: “Man, it’s so easy it probably shouldn’t even be legal.”
• Pretty error pages: So pretty that now it is nice to have errors in your code ;-)

On the community side, there is also activity, like Simon Willinson’s talk in London, the Ajax flamewars^Wdiscussion in the developers mailing list and the upcoming Snake and Rubies event in Chicago, where Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of DJango, and David Heinemeier, creator of Ruby on Rails, will answer questions about their frameworks.

And Django will have 2 talks in Pycon 2006:

• Using Django to supercharge Web development by Adrian Holovaty, and
• Django tutorial by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

On my personal use with Django, I will soon start to develop Aureal ’s second Django powered application for one of our customers, and I will use some of the cool new features in PostgreSQL 8.1.

There is still no django screencast, but I’ll try to make one this week.