Django

What two posts within an hour? Yeah I originally had this following my previous one however the post was too long and I’ve decided my posts should try to stick to a single topic.

So whilst I was waiting for Ubuntu Fesity Fawn to download I started checking out the Django Project and wow I’m pretty impressed. For my next CS162 project we have to learn a new language or API and do a thorough report on it. From what I’ve read and watched the Django project is amazing. It’s very comparable to Ruby on Rails, though I cannot speak from experience about that.

I’ve already begun to create a list of strong points and weak points on the application. By the way I’m working off the version in the SVN trunk, but I haven’t looked at the branches to see if any of these weak points are being resolved.

First and foremost the ease of abstracting the database is by far one of its strong points and allows developers to concentrate on their Object Oriented (OO) programming and not worry about relationships between object fields and database entries. With my php projects I almost never used OO programming, as it really didn’t fit my development model for projects. The downside was that it was much slower to do it this way, but with Django everything needs to be an object and it’s great.

Along with the benefit of the previous Django has a huge downside. Once a module is initially created and data is populated, manual table changes are required to add or remove fields from an object. I see this as a huge drawback because I am code by writing a few lines, testing, and repeating. If I discover later that I need to store an additional field I shouldn’t have to manually add the field to the database but rather it should insert a default value into the field and I should manually add the information I need. Adding one piece of information to x number of rows is much simpler than repopulating all the data in all the rows. Of course there are ways I could get around this to make adding fields simpler, however the fact still remains that I should never have to manually change anything in the database.

Another wonderful part of Django is its admin interface. The Django developers did all Django users a great favor by including this, because that’s typically the one part of a project I hate doing most; in fact I usually just administer information through phpMyAdmin to avoid writing an admin interface. Of course this is the worst way possible when relationships need to be created.

That’s really all I have currently on the subject as I haven’t created a font end to an application. My observation about it abstracting the database is great for someone who doesn’t know SQL however it also can be seen as a bad thing. I learned sql so that I could be more efficient with web developing by utilizing MySql to store information. Had I started with Django and its abstraction I wouldn’t be forces to understand what’s happening under the covers and thus would be stuck when trying to troubleshoot a problem.

Thus I recommend Django to all new web developers however I also recommend to create a really simple application with object relations, and then create the same project using php (or in python using python-mysql) so that one may learn what’s going on under the covers, and so that they may fully appreciate the Django project.