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.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:05:00 +0000

@Milan: Yes, that’s exactly right. I simply meant that the application stopped working. As the threads died, the page would load – but it took forever to load, and eventually simply stopped working. It looked as though the site was running slowly, but in fact it was just maxing out Apache’s request table as you said.

@Shawn: thanks for the excellent link – the problem is that I’m (perhaps mistakenly?) using MAMP. I might update the article to say so. Coming from the XAMPP on windows, which I’ve found to be excellent, I’ve found that MAMP has a few very interesting quirks, and this may be one of them. Having said that, it’s still a bit of a trick getting MySQL-Python to work on OS X, wouldn’t you say?

By: Shawn Blower

Shawn Blower — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:02:05 +0000

I recently installed Python, Django, and MySQL on OS X. I also had trouble at first. It had to do with python-mysql. This website did the trick.

By: Milan Andric

Milan Andric — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:24:36 +0000

When you say that KeepAlives ON meant that Matt ran slower, and slower, and slower … Don’t you really mean that your apache processes where filling up the apache request table according to MaxClients and not picking up new requests? I don’t see how a KeepAlive config could make the application slower. Just wrong choice of words or am I over-simplifying?

Re: “easy PHP hosting”
Python has been around for quite a long time, before PHP, as well as mod_python. People just haven’t been asking for it as much until recently, with web frameworks, and most decent providers have stepped up. Finding easy Django hosting is not a problem these days?

By: Lawrence Oluyede

Lawrence Oluyede — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:02:34 +0000

It’s common practice to have separate settings for separate environments (and maybe N loca ones for each developer). We, in a project, had:

- settings_production.py with all the keys/values
- settings_development.py with:

“”"
from settings_production import *
# CUSTOMIZATION OF ALL THE KEYS/VALUES
“”"

- settings_staging.py with:

“”"
from settings_production import *
# CUSTOMIZATION OF ALL THE KEYS/VALUES
“”"

and each developer had its settings.py (outside source control) with:

“”"
from settings_development import *
# CUSTOMIZATION OF ALL THE KEYS/VALUES
“”"

Hope this helps

By: Peter Herndon

Peter Herndon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:32:09 +0000

Here's a great post on setting up local settings files. As for getting MySQL to talk to Python, I downloaded the SVN trunk version of MySQLdb and compiled it myself -- I believe the released version won't work terribly well on OS X. I am running Leopard, BTW, so that may have an impact. Python development is *much* easier on Leopard than on Tiger -- no need to install a lot of stuff, as Apple includes a lot more. Finally, let me point to Wing IDE. I've not used it myself, but I've seen it demoed at PyCon, and it looks exceedingly fit for purpose. Other than that, your points are really very valid. I love Django, but the configuration is... large and messy. Logical, though.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:08:13 +0000

Hi Ben,

Sorry – I meant to say that we had trouble making Python work with MySQL on OS X. MySQL runs perfectly :) Thanks for your comment!

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:58:17 +0000

MySQL on OS X should be very straightforward, just a case of grabbing the latest x86 package (currently that's here), and installing the package. Does mysqld not start, or throw any errors?

By: Brian Luft

Brian Luft — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:47:55 +0000

You brought up a good point about managing Django projects across environments. I see this often as a point of confusion for newcomers to the framework – especially with respect to laying out project and app structure. It doesn’t help that the tutorials prompt the user to lay out the directory structure in a way that most seasoned users don’t use. I appreciate the flexibility afforded but I can imagine that it can be frustrating for a beginner trying to figure out what the “best” practice is for organizing code.

The settings files are another place where the Django devs decided to allow for individuality. A common practice is to manage machine/host specific settings in a separate local_settings.py file which is imported from settings.

It is always great to get a sense of how the initial Django experience shapes up for developers – especially devs familiar with other frameworks and building a real-world application. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with the community.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:27:11 +0000

Hi Elliott.
We develop mainly in Rails, and have Mac based Studio. MySQL has never been a problem to install (with the package direct from the site mySQL.com, and onto our Leopard MacBooks / Pro’s) and the supplied tools allow us to work through a GUI and also connect to our db servers at Media Temple.

Happy to share some experience if you want to drop us a note.

Matt looks great, we also have been working on a Twitter app over the last weeks and you can read our experiences at: http://blog.ocvision.com

We need to try Django one day. The Pownce story is a great case study for the language.

Dan

By: Alcides Fonseca

Alcides Fonseca — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:15:16 +0000

Hi, I’m a django developer, and I use environments, although there is not a default practice for this. I have settings.py that depending on the os.uname()[1] (machine name) I import settings_prod, settings_dev or whatever settings you want.

As for MySQL in OSX, many people find that difficult, here’s how to compile: http://hivelogic.com/articles/2007/11/installing-mysql-on-mac-os-x and a better pref panel here: ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/MySQL.prefPane-leopardfix.zip