Hacking for fun and profit

This will be a _very_short post.

Guido van Rossum is considering the use of Django (among other python web frameworks) to develop a project in Google. He is having some minor gripes with it:

• The templating language is not pythonic: This is IMHO a Good Thing. It enforces separation of code and presentation, and is an ideal way for designers to work directly in the templates (most designers are not programmers).
• Too much magic: Guido should check the Removing The Magic page in the wiki about the magic-removal branch. The branch is available in subversion in http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/branches/magic-removal

Back to work now.

Update: Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote an excelent piece: why django.

Looking in django’s del.icio.us page this morning, and I found out that Lawrence Journal-World finally made a website for Ellington, the Django framework powered CMS they wrote for sites like lawrence.com, LJWorld.com and KUSports.com.

The site itself is a little short on details. There are no demos, tours or pdf overviews, but there isn’t any marketroid babble neither, which is a Good Thing.

Ellington is Django’s killer app right now. While not opensource it demonstrates what can be done with the framework: professional, scalable and production-ready web applications.

The Apache HTTP server is by far the most used web server in the world. It is an excellent, feature packed and standards compliant web server. Extremely configurable, with an endless amount of modules, superb documentation and, due to its license, is being used commercially by companies like Oracle. There is only a small problem with Apache: It’s not the fastest server around. This is because historically, Apache’s priorities have been correctness and configurability, not performance. Correctness and configurability are the reasons why Apache powers almost 70% of the web today, but still, Apache has a big, fat ass (we are talking about system resources here).

(more…)