Monday lightning talks (djangocon.eu)¶

Introducing django REST framework - Tom Christie¶

See http://django-rest-framework.org/ .

The first version was released in February. Django rest framework uses django 1.3’s class based views. Very cool is that it creates web browsable APIs.

We’re all building cool REST services, but you can’t browse them on the internet to discover about them. An API should be self-describing. But an API explorer is not the answer: it is an unnecessary indirection.

It is not just about making everything shiny. If we design our API to be browsable they will be better designed and faster to work with. They’re also more transparent, open and self explanatory. Making it open in this way helps you in designing it.

Revised form rendering - Gregor Muellegger¶

Revised form rendering is a GSOC project. The current rendering just plain sucks. It is not possible to change a widget on the fly. You can’t change the order of the form fields without editing the python file. Etc.

So: template based form rendering! There’ll be a new form template tag with a couple of options to modify the form before rendering. {% formlayout "ul" %}{% form myform %} for instance.

It is based on Bruno Renié’s awsome template based widgets work.

You can also configure in the template to use a certain widget for certain types of fields. Awesome if he can pull it off!

Djangozoom - Nate Aune¶

See http://djangozoom.com/, “effortless deployment for Django”.

There are pains when going live with a site. Setting up a database. Setting up your webserver. Backups. Monitoring. Logging.

So Nate thought “there must be something to this”. Every minute you’re playing sysadmin is a minute you’re not spending coding. So it should be automated, right? A quest for development nirwana! How to make deployment a non-event?

Amazon’s web services were a taste of the promised land. Easy starting/stopping, but you still have to configure the machine itself.

Then google’s app engine launcher came out with a nice “deploy” button right there at the top of the toolbar. Great! But you’d have the app engine restrictions.

When would a good one for python come out? He decided to build one himself. In a demo he got from a github project to a running site in 49 seconds.

They’re in private beta now, but do contact him while at the conference.

Dynamic forms¶

Clients often want to create forms themselves, for instance a contact form. Dynamic forms solves that. Adding forms, fields and getting mailed responses.

A form’s type determines the base form template that is used, for instance.

You can add your own templates for confirmation emails. Optionally they can be send based on data in the submitted form.

There’s also csv export of the form’s data.

(I couldn’t find the actual project on pypi, so here’s a google query for you. Apparently he’ll push it to github somewhere in June).

PyCharm¶

See http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/

They handed out free licenses during the conference, so interesting to see what it can do!

Pycharm is the most intelligent IDE for python and django. 1.5 came out today. There’s django template debugging, for instance.

Most of the lightning talk was a live demo. Very well done: expansion inside django templates. It remembers the blocks that are available from inherited templates, for instance. And code completion for items you passed along from your view in the context. Slick.

Virtualizing django - Peter Kese¶

Peter wants to brainstorm on something, so he asked some questions.

Virtualizing, scaling… How to deal with sites and apps that are pretty similar with just small differences? Every site has a slightly different database with just a couple of different fields. For a while you can put a couple of if/else statements here and there in your app. And perhaps a templates/ and templates_other/ directory.

Now how to get this running in a single virtualenv? contrib.sites isn’t good enough to get different databases running, that’s not what it is meant for. And the contenttype mechanism uses a class-based cache dictionary that doesn’t help.

Announcement of djangocon US 2012 and 2013 - Steve Holden¶

2012 will be in Washington, 2013 in Chicago. They’re still negotiating with venues, but at least the cities are fixed.