Comments on: Matt Week – What was it like?

By: Rahul Malik

Rahul Malik — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:34:54 +0000

I’ve been using Django on and off for personal and professional projects for roughly a year now. I would say that I stayed with it because I was much more comfortable with python as a language and I didn’t seem to hit any serious roadblocks with the framework itself with what i was trying to accomplish.

The problem, when the app gets large, is that I find the design of the application (not user interface but code organization) becomes more difficult and doesn’t seem to make as much sense. If you are developing a web application it seems that rails might be better suited with their strict conventions rather than trying to find a way to cleanly set up a set of reusable apps like django encourages.

for the settings environments i would just create separate settings.py files or check which machine or user is starting the application in order to determine which environment to load.

I’ll probably get back into rails (i started around the initial release) sometime soon and my main concern is developing a rails app that will be difficult to upgrade to future versions of rails. The django community cares deeply about backwards compatibility and their documentation is by far some of the best in the open source community.

feel free to email me for any django questions or concerns!

@rmalik

By: Stephen Walli

Stephen Walli — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:38:36 +0000

I had a similar problem when I started experimenting with Django on the Mac. Here’s how I solved it:
http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2008/10/mac-django-mysq.html

By: Greg Fuller

Greg Fuller — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:22:32 +0000

I’m using MAMP with Django. The trick is to point DATABASE_HOST to the socket:

DATABASE_HOST = ‘/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock’

By: Keir

Keir — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:19:33 +0000

Apologies for those who posted and comments didn’t appear promptly. For some reason WordPress required them to be moderated, suspect the links got them flagged.

By: Keir

Keir — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:11:13 +0000

@james Nice to see your comment on the blog – thanks for stopping by. Funnily enough I have been reading your book today and am finding it really useful.

I know the environments situation was something we didn’t quite get right this time but thanks to the comments here and some recent reading I think we will definitely try and implement something soon.

I think your point about working with Python as well as Django is really important here. Personally the lack of “magic” is one of the main attractions to the framework for me. I love the flexibility but can fully understand why some developers favour “convention over configuration”.

By: Dave Marshall

Dave Marshall — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:53:57 +0000

With regards to getters and setters, you can always use PHP5’s overloading magic methods (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.overloading.php)

I don’t think it’s as elegant, but has the same effect?

public $email;

becomes

private $email;

public function __set($prop, $val) {
$method = ’set’ . ucfirst($prop);
return $this->$method($val);
}

public function __get($prop) {
$method = ‘get’ . ucfirst($prop);
return $this->$method;
}

/**
* standard getters and setters
*/

By: James Bennett

James Bennett — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:59:55 +0000

I find myself agreeing with Lawrence on setting up “environments”; the key thing I’ve found in teaching people Django is the realization that you need to learn to work with not just Django but Django and Python, because Django deliberately doesn’t reinvent a lot of things Python can already provide (better versions of) for free. So the natural thing for “environments” is just different settings files that you point to according to what you’re doing; since they’re just Python, they’re free to import from each other selectively and override things as needed.

By: Matt Courtney

Matt Courtney — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:49:37 +0000

Very interesting post but it didn’t answer the question of why Elliott spends all day snacking.

By: Lawrence Oluyede

Lawrence Oluyede — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:01:14 +0000

@Elliott: eh eh python philosophy (and hence Django’s) is to give more control to the developer being more explicit. That’s why there’s less magic than in Rails.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:17:03 +0000

and @Lawrence, I like your solution, that would work. But really, it’s a bit of a workaround for useful functionality that isn’t present. In my opinion it would be more a bit elegant if the framework took care of that for you. I may be nit-picking :)

also @Milan regarding Python hosting – you’re right, Python is available with most good providers. But PHP hosting is definitely more wide-spread and available, as is PHP support… and I dare say more developers are picking up PHP than python. I don’t think this is a particularly good thing, though. It seems as though this is changing – Google App engine uses Python, for example.