Hacking for fun and profit

Some moths ago I wrote about the BDFL considering the use of the Django web framework.

Cronologically it went like this:

Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python! (2006-01-27)

Literally a cry for help. He didn’t quite like the magic in Django, considering he used a pre magic-removal version.

Web Framework Redux (2006-01-30)

Perhaps WSGI represents the “blank slate” approach; Rails/Django represent the wizard approach; I’m still looking for the ideal mix-and-match solution.

Django vs. Cheetah: 1-0 (2006-01-31)

Guido is beginning to like the Django templates.

Which Part of “No XML” Don’t You Understand?

This one is related to his previous post. Guido just think that the use of XML in a template engine is WRONG. I couldn’t agree more.

Django Gaining Steam (2006-5-4)

Guido talks about Jacob’s Django talk in the Bay Area and Jeff Croft’s Django for non-programmers (a great article).

Months after that, Guido got interviewed in FLOSS weekly (2006-08-04) and he declared:

Leo La Porte (LL): Python doesn’t have a native GUI, there is TCL/tk… is that an issue?

Guido van Rossum (GvR): It seems to be coming less and less of an issue because more and more people are doing everything over the web

LL: The web is an interface, yeah

GvR: So of course that doesn’t really solves the problem because then you have, as I say, more web frameworks than keywords in the language. My personal favorite and I expect that will remain personal favorite for a long time is something named Django.

LL: I was going to ask you about Django. There was just a … just somebody published some article, interesting I think it was in the Rails website testing Django, Rails and a Perl framework and Django was by far the fastest.

GvR: Interesting! I didn’t hear about that.

Chris di Bona (CdB): How do you measure something like a web framework?

LL: Well they set a simple site and they used web testing applications to create lots of transactions and measure transactions and Django was like significally faster. So tell us about Django.

GvR: I am a very satisfied user of a very small part of Django. Django is sort of, I would call it probably a second generation web framework in Python where first generation would be things like Zope and Twisted. Django was originally started I think two guys who work for, believe it or not, a newspaper in Kansas. Not a very glorious location.

CdB: Well, it’s funny because Zope and Plone came out of the (??) newspaper.

LL: Well you know why, they have to streamline production workflows, that’s a big deal for a newspaper

GvR: Maybe that’s the case. This paper in Kansas decided that they wanted to set a local website with information for people in their town that was very responsive to the audience. They wanted to publish things very quickly but also not just add new articles to the site which everybody can do, but change the site completly, add new ideas, new features to the site, add new applications. They came up with endless number of examples, for example publish the sports, like the local sports results of the little league complete with hyperlinks to the teams and photos and all sort of interesting stuff. And they wanted to be able to roll that out very quickly and so I think they did that for maybe two years, and the two guys who did it and working with a bunch of editor who where providing the content, as they were doing that they realized that they needed a framework and they sort of grew a framework out of their first application. As they (??) what kind of things their editors were constantly asking them to them change to the site, they developed more flexibility in all those areas. And at some point they said let’s open source it and they got support from the newspaper. And then a very interesting thing hapenned. I suppose the newspaper is still using Django in some form (they are, and in fact they are selling the CMS they build). I think both of the original developers are no longer working there and they started Django the Open Source Project and what I found really great about that is I talked to those guys a couple of times and see them give presententations and I’ve seen how they work, and they really get open source. And they have a good license, but in my view even more important is the whole process, the way they work with the user community, the way they answer, they find a ballance between chaos and democracy and anarchy and sort of between Cathedral and Bazaar. They let lots of users add new features and provide ideas without losing the original thought and flexibility of the framework and I can think they are really doing a fantastic job at making Django a better product that goes way beyond what that original Kansas newspaper needed.

(now they talk about the Django vs Rails benchmark and how Django is an order of magnitude faster than Rails…)

LL: I will have to take a look at Django, because that’s pretty impressive.

GvR: Absolutely, I highly recommend it.

And yesterday (2006-08-17), at least two sources (Titus Brown and The Third Bit) are talking about what the BDFL said in SciPy 2006:

• Django is the web framework.
• It won’t be included in the standard library because of different development cycles, but will (should?) be as “standard” as PIL or NumPy
• He hopes that Django and TurboGears will converge

There is a discussion about this on reddit.

What do you guys think?