So it seems this is now yet another blog isn’t updated. Actually, I’ve only posted once this year to mention that I was going to EuroDjangoCon.

To keep that trend going for the moment. I just want to say that I am going to be going to EuroPython in Birmingham. The line up looks really good and I’m looking forward to it.

I’d be interested in meeting up with any Django developers that are attending or in the area. I’ll be around on the conference days but can only make the first sprint day, the Friday.

I’ve had a huge number of things going on lately and my twitter account seems to have taken over most of my need to write posts. However, I do have some plans for my website and projects I want to start. I hope to do these over the next few months.

Hope to see some of you at EuroPython. Let me know if your going!

Just a quick note to say I just registered to go to EuroDjangoCon! Head over to http://euro.djangocon.org/ to sign up for the earlybird prices!

I can’t wait, it’s going to be Awesome.

Hope to see you all there!

Following in the footsteps of various other people…

“(We’ll address your perfectionist side later.)”

via Python Web Development With Django

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

You know what really grinds my gears?

This gripe is similar to one I had with PHP4/5 were I don’t actually have a problem with Internet Explorer 6 believe it or not. Internet Explorer 6 served me and many many other people very well in its time.

Now, however, it is an ugly beast that we need to let die. The only minor thing stopping this is the millions of people that still use it. I know many of these people are not interested, have there hands tied (i.e. at work) or just don’t know any better. However, the matter of fact is, they still force me to consider Internet Explorer 6.

There are some really quite interesting and funny ways to encourage and educate people into upgrading. Perhaps we should all resort to nagging users to upgrade. I know I’m tempted to do something on my website despite only 9% of my visitors this year using internet explorer.

…and that people is what grinds my gears!

Disclaimer: I’m not naive enough to think that Django is for everybody and that’s why the title reads ‘try’ and not ‘use’. However, I do think after giving Django a chance and breaking out of your cycle you will be impressed. I also realize due to where I’m aggregated I’m preaching too many of the converted. However, perhaps if nothing else this will help your arguments when persuading others or your work to give Django a go. I’m also going to assume you know nothing about Django or even much about programming. Finally, I write this as I am getting more and more frustrated with having to work in other environments.

Clients often don’t know what they want, I think this is a sore spot shared by many web developers. Companies often know they ‘want’ and ‘need’ a website but usually they don’t know why, what they need or what they can even do. This can make the development process a bit rocky. I’ve found that often clients start to get a better idea of what they want/need as the development progresses. This is exactly why dynamic, agile development is so beneficial.

So let’s set the scenes with a very simple PHP example (purely because it’s what I know best). You have a news posting system, kind of like a simple blog. Its mySQL powered and you have everything working, you can do all the normal CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) functionality. To do this you have a bunch of SQL queries, a few different forms made up and its all good to go. The client is very happy however they just realised they need to be able to add a picture to each of the news stories! You of course have not taken this into account, how could you? You didn’t know. In this system you would need to, update your database, update your SQL queries, update your forms and form handling code. Nightmare! Now you need to tell the client the news, let them know that it’s not that straight forward and give them a price. This might lose you some business or create an unhappy customer.

Now, take a Django solution. It’s set up with the same functionality and uses a bunch of custom forms and management pages (rather than django-admin). How much of this do you need to update? You first find your model. Add a picture field and assuming you’re still in dev with no important data - just drop the database (or modify the tables manually)  and resync then you’re done.

How is it so easy?

Django’s ORM creates the database based on the models and handles all the querying of data. If you use ModelForm then forms are created based on the models too and thus updated. The only thing you will need to update is the HTML/CSS to include the picture into your design.

With most frameworks doing such changes would just not be that straight forward and quick!

Of course, if you will often want to do more with picture such as re-size and create thumbnails etc. but this is just a very basic example.