Hacking for fun and profit

Just some minutes ago, Adrian Holovaty announced that Django’s magical removal branch has been merged to trunk. This means that now the mythical Django-without-the-magic is now the official development version.

We have been using the MR branch in Aureal for almost two months now. The last pre-magic-removal projects were migrated to MR the last week, since we could see that it was very stable. The merging of today just confirms this.

But what does Magic-Removal really mean?

It means mainly removing all the magic modules from django’s models. Also the way the ORM works is even better, and the programmer can do things that couldn’t be possible in pre-MR Django. Sadly, all these changes are backwards incompatible, but I can assure you that migrating a project is very simple, and it’s worth doing it considering the benefits you’ll get.

The Framework is a lot more Pythonic than it was before.

Remember the BDFL’s gripes about Django?

Similarly, I’m not keen on their object-relational mapping approach. There’s too much magic based on name correspondence, and the automatically generated APIs feel a bit unpythonic.

I hope he and all the people that didn’t like all the magic in Django can take another look at the framework, since it is all gone for good now.