Jirka Schäfer: Django at the enterprise¶

Tags: django, djangocon

It can be a problem to convince (big) companies that Python and Django are fine. “We don’t know Python, can you do it in Java?”.

From a business perspective, nobody cares about Django. Only budget, flexibility and IT guidelines matter.

When you need to convince a CTO: only do projects which have significant support by senior level management. And ask for a requirement that says “uses J2EE and Oracle”. Don’t mention Django as long as you can. Jython is better than Python because of the ‘J’: always start every django sentence with “Java…”. Deliver the SQL create statements and a .war file and say “deploy as usual”. Ensure that the first install attempt is successful and nobody will be asking any questions.

Beware: the whole process is highly political.

Running Django in Jython? The huge advantage is that you can give them a .war file and that’s all. No special libraries on the server are needed. No additional configuration needed. There are drawbacks like performance issues (up to 10x slower). And not all python modules are usable (like PIL).

Django is, compared to other dynamic scripting languages, very easy to integrate into enterprise IT environments.