A framework for WebProgramming.
Masthead
- URL
- version
- Still not officially launched, but SVN access to development version available now
- licence
- Django is open source software available under a BSD license.
- platforms
- Unix, Windows, Mac
- Python versions
>= 2.3
Deployment Platforms
ModPython is supported, WSGI support has recently been added and there is also a standalone web server for development purposes.
Suitability
Django currently powers lawrence.com, ljworld.com and chicagocrime.org, along with a bunch of smaller sites such as visitlawrence.com and kkcscountry.com. It seems to have been developed and mainly used for content management, but its rich features - templating, and automatic generation of database, database access layer, and admin interface generation from a model description given in straight python code - will be useful in other kinds of web applications, too.
URL dispatching
URLs are mapped to request handler functions using regular expressions. A regex may capture parts of the URL, which are then passed to the function as arguments.
Environment Access
Django creates an HttpRequest object that contains metadata about the request. This is automatically passed to the function that the URL is mapped to and gets to create the response.
Session, Identification and Authentication
Sessions are propagated using cookies, the session data stored in a dictionary within the request object. Identification / Authentication: For each application, a pretty sophisticated admin interface is generated that knows about superusers, groups, users and privileges. It seems that support for normal users registering themselves would have to be added manually.
Persistence Support
Django's object-relational mapper provides the core of the framework, currently supports PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite3. Django can also generate CRUD interfaces from the ORM. The automatic creation of database tables and database abstraction layer from pythonic model definition is really quite elegant and probably Django's most distinctive feature. A very nice feature is that you can still embed SQL in an unobtrusive way within your model's methods if you have to, e.g. for complex queries with joins over multiple tables. Thus, the mapper can handle the 90% of the cases that are simple, yet will step aside elegantly where it should.
Presentation Support
Django has a Smarty-like template language. Good: It supports inheritance. Bad: Syntax quite hard on the eyes {% block title %}{% endblock %} That's even uglier than PHP
Documentation
Growing, not quite complete yet but well written and already far more usable and detailed than with your average Python framework's haphazard wiki.
InTheirOwnWords
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Developed and used over the past two years by a newspaper Web operation, Django is well-suited for developing content-management systems. It was designed from scratch to handle the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of experienced Web developers. It focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.
Includes a template system, object-relational mapper and a framework for dynamically creating admin interfaces.
Ruby on Rails is similar to it, but Django is written in Python and has a few more advanced conveniences for super-quick Web development.
Read the [http://www.djangoproject.com/overview/ Django overview]