django

toastdriven/django-tastypie. I think I've mentioned this before, but it doesn't matter, it still looks interesting - an alternative to django-piston with significantly more functionality (for example, quite extensive options for authentication and authorization). What does it do? REST interfaces for Django models including their relations. In various formats (XML, JSON, YAML).

Make runfcgi fail when database connection is open before fork. This is something I've been chasing for ages, most recently in a few pretty important projects. Flup works by first initializing the WSGI application and then making the forks for the workers with this initialized WSGI application. Unfortunately, we have database accesses during application initialization - as a result, the base process already has an open database connection, and each fork copies these data. But the socket of the connection doesn't go with it - the new process just thinks it's connected, but it's not. Accesses from the new processes then fail with an exception. In the linked patch, you can also replace the raise on the exception with connection.connection = None. This simply discards the connection that is already defective and always builds a new connection in new processes. With this, we have at least been able to fix this in a production environment (with psycopg2) and are optimistic that it will also help in the environment with pyodbc.

#18251 multithreading deadlock in django.models.loading.get_apps – Django. And another thing that might affect us - race conditions between Django threads during the initialization of Django applications. There's already a patch for this that fixes it in the Django internals.

Using SELECT FOR UPDATE in Django. That's what it's all about. Because the Django ORM cannot currently generate a SELECT FOR UPDATE, but sometimes you just need it.

Radius limited searching with the ORM | Neogeo ramblings with a Python twist. Looking at this, there are really nice features in GeoDjango. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a project where I could use it, so just bookmarked for later. The blog also has other interesting articles about GeoDjango.

Pinax. And once again something I think I already had. But for current reasons, it has come back on my radar, and therefore I will take a closer look at it. Something like a peddler's tray for Django projects with a focus on social networks and community sites. Sounds very interesting - a bit like Drupal with Python and on Django (so rather not finished sites but building blocks and framework for creating them).

Django Facebook 2.0 – Integrating Facebook. Since it's interesting at the moment (yes, yes, I know, everything is G+, but one should act counter-cyclically), here's a link to a Django library with which you can build Open Graph apps for Facebook. Could be interesting again, especially with the new Facebook Timeline. And G+? Well, as long as they only provide meager cut-rate APIs, it's simply uninteresting for tinkerers.

Django-nonrel - NoSQL support for Django. Provides a first approach to integrating various NoSQL databases into Django at the level of the Django ORM. Backends for MongoDB (no thanks), AppEngine and Cassandra are in the works. Cassandra is particularly interesting to me at the moment.

chrisdickinson's wilson. One before lunch, as the framework is heavily inspired by Django, and since I'm a Django fan, it's definitely worth its own link.

robhudson's django-debug-toolbar at master - GitHub - ok, this tool is officially hugo-approved. Simply brilliant, it provides exactly the right amount of information for Django development and doesn't interfere with existing layouts (at least it worked well for me in experiments).

postgres 9 streaming replication and django balancer - Santana may not yet run with Django 1.2, but the balancer for database access combined with PostgreSQL replication sounds like a nice method to scale up Django systems when normal means with one database are no longer sufficient. Maybe I should set up a test installation.

Filtering Dropdown Lists in the Django Admin — Stereoplex - because it is often needed and because some good ways are described here.

dcramer's django-sentry at master - GitHub - unfortunately only Django 1.2 (my own internal framework that is based on Django is unfortunately not compatible with 1.2 at the moment), but very interesting for collecting error messages from Django in the database for later evaluation. Of course, you can also have the errors sent to you by mail, which is already possible with built-in tools, but especially when several people are maintaining a system, storing them in the database can be much more convenient.

jessemiller's HamlPy - I need to check this out, an implementation of HAML (basically a shorthand notation for HTML) with integration for Django. This could be interesting for the many small internal templates, as they are created by programmers and not designers. However, I would first have to see how well (or how poorly) I can integrate JavaScript with it. But definitely interesting - HTML is not really Diff/Merge-friendly and simply annoying to write and read.

Aeracode :: On Django And Migrations - South core libraries may move to the Django core in the near future (possibly targeting Django 1.4). I approve. Having the basis for migrations already in the Django core would not only be helpful for migrations but also for projects that require higher dynamics in the data models - my current hack with sqldiff and some self-made code is just that: a hack. It's probably time to take a closer look at South (so far only briefly looked at it, but what I've seen I liked) and consider whether I should already now put my hack on a more powerful basis.

django-pagination - I need to take a closer look at this, it looks interesting. Pagination is not really difficult, but it's annoying to build it yourself every time - and Django's built-in tools are not always optimal for this (especially with large amounts of data).

django-ajax-filtered-fields - I need to take a closer look at this, it could be quite interesting in the Admin for larger amounts of sentences in relations.

Johnny Cache v0.1 documentation - definitely try this out with a project at the company, as the model is quite powerful and I could elegantly solve some of the problems for which I currently have special solutions. It's also quite similar to my first approach to this problem (although I have now solved the biggest performance problems through redundant data storage and automatic updates to objects, also quite elegantly).

rfc1437 / django-standalone / overview — bitbucket.org - As I often refer to Bitbucket, GitHub, or Google Code, here's a link to my own small package on Bitbucket: django-standalone. It was created because I often need an ORM for small scripts and tools, but I want to keep the hassle to a minimum - not set up an entire Django project, but simply define a few models in my script and initialize the DB via parameters and then use it. Preferably with sqlite3. This library makes it wonderfully easy, and I can finally cross one of my long-standing projects - "write a simple ORM for simple scripts myself" - off my to-do list.

dajaxproject.com - easy to use ajax library for django - maybe I should take a look at that, the current project might use quite a bit of Ajax and if you can reduce the amount of JavaScript that would be quite desirable.

django-piston - I should also take a closer look at this, as it is supposed to facilitate the building of Web APIs with Django. And some of my company projects could benefit from it.

Presenting django-devserver, a better runserver. - interesting idea, an extension of runserver that logs SQL statements and provides cache information. This could be quite interesting for my current Django project, as I sometimes produce somewhat more complex SQL there. (And yes, I'm tinkering with Django again, maybe something publishable will come out of it - but it's primarily a work project).

Faster or Lazier Pagination - interesting approach, simply not to determine the amount of sentences, but instead to assume a number of pages and update this when accessing later pages. A bit similar to some websites that only offer a section of the page list as navigation - for this you don't need to know how many pages there really are. Google also cheats by limiting the number of pages to a maximum. For large amounts of data with slow count(*) certainly very useful and possibly you could also combine this with cached maximum page numbers for different queries, so that the next time the assumption about the amount is already more precise.

django-extensions - very useful tools for Django that plug into the manage. For example, a diff for SQL.

django-history-tables - could be interesting for a project at the company, there is also the requirement for a history of data changes.

matthiask's feincms - extensible CMS for Django. Looks very interesting, especially the quite compact extensibility for custom content types.

ReusableAppResources - Django - Trac - general starting point if you want to search for Django apps, from here you are referred to the various comparison lists.

Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses - digging through British MPs' expense lists in Django. Interesting article about the pitfalls and problems of such a project at the Guardian.

Haystack - Search for Django - and this is the integration of Whoosh in Django. There are others, but this one seems the most developed.

formsets and inline forms in Django - a similar problem came up at the company recently, so here's a blog post that might be the solution.

PyGoWave Server - I don't know if I already had this, but I just searched for it again on this occasion: an implementation of the Google Wave idea in Python. And the funny thing: the website underneath is built with Django!

for post in leo.blog():: Django-Jython 1.0.0 released! - not unimportant for a project at work: Django-Jython is finished. And included is the Oracle client, which we would also urgently need for the project. Nice.

Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search - interesting project: Haystack. An extension of Django to add full-text search with an interface very similar to the normal Django database interface.

django-jython - because I might be able to use it for a company project.

django-queue-service - simple Queueing System based on Django. Could be very interesting for projects in the company.

Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment - relevant for Django, because the developer Simon Willison is one of the Djangonauts and built the whole thing with Django. Great job!

Second edition of Practical Django Projects - because I will need it for the company as well. And it is based on Django 1.1!

One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan - Zed Shaw guckt sich Django an. Und mag es.

Weekend Grid Outages - SL now uses Django internally (last paragraph)! Not the only interesting point, a few nice insider information regarding the service design. As with all such projects, apparently a grown chaos of poorly scalable approaches.

Mobile Django Admin Patches - Shifting Bits by Patrick Altman - use Django Admin via iPhone. Nice feature.

Django 1.0 released! - it took a long time, but that can certainly be beneficial for the quality. And here it is. Congratulations!

Django on Jython: It's here! - awesome! This makes Java as a platform more interesting to me again - the progress in Jython in the last few months has been gigantic.

Django snippets: MintCache - interesting idea to avoid the "Dogpile-Effect": if the regeneration of data takes longer than new requests come in, the requests that trigger the regeneration of old data pile up, and this makes the generation time even longer. This cache idea triggers the regeneration on the first access to outdated data, but simply delivers the previous old data to all others, thus avoiding multiple regeneration and the associated annoying load effect.

The Django Book - progressive Beta-Releases of the Django Book chapters on the web (with information on when the chapters go online).

Introducing Django 0.95 - new Django release out. Magic removed.

Generic Table Relations for Django. Very interesting, this makes things like tags in data models much easier. I should be able to get rid of a lot of stuff from my Stuff-Library with this.

Are you generic? - Wilson Miner describes how he, as a non-programmer, can create applications himself without programmer assistance using Django and its simple generic view functions.

Django for non-programmers - Django from a web designer's perspective.

Django Weblog "magic-removal" branch merged - gaaaah. Work. Crap.

London 2.0 RC 4 - Monday 3rd April

At least they get it right this time and announce early: London 2.0 RC 4 - Monday 3rd April. Hey, if adrian_h is dropping in, that would definitely be an incentive for me to hop over to London (it's just something like 7-9 hours by train from my hometown) and join in

Now I only have to check wether I can do hotel booking and ordering up front for reasonable rates around here, but what I did see is that the cheapest tickets are 49 EUR for the full drive, so there is plenty space for the hotel costs.