Lightning talks at the Dutch Django meeting (part two)¶

Customizing the Django admin interface - Arthur de Jong¶

They build http://publications.cta.int/ . They’re using Django since 2006 and they love it. They have large customers and work on “business-critical IT systems”.

http://publications.cta.int/ is a website. Django site that works quite well. The problem? The publications from that website are ordered by people from Africa. Which means a big multilingual need! 8k publications per month are ordered with 2.7M objects in the database.

He showed a slide with the libraries they were using. Wow, that was a whopping lot of open source code. (Personal note: scare my boss with that number; what we’re doing is still pretty OK :-) )

Their project uses the Django admin quite a lot for managing, for instance, orders. But they wanted some extra javascript interaction, for instance for more easily deleting or adding items to an order. Adding functionality to the admin interface is more complex and harder than they expected.

They used generic relations, but they don’t perform well. At least not when you get to 50k objects. Comment from the audience: perhaps the latest Django’s pre-fetch related might help a lot!

Oh, and SOLR is really cool.

Using an IDE for Django development - Diederik¶

Using an IDE might be controversial: many people are very happy with VI and EMACS. But he tries to show us that we ought to use an IDE.

An IDE ensures your imports are correct, that you don’t have undefined variables, no CSS spelling errors and no unused imports. With hand-written code in a non-IDE-editor you must surely get all those errors.

Diederik uses PyCharm, which has nice Python and Django integration and helps you write better code. It also helps you figuring out Django internals. And it has very handy completion.

Personal note: you can get all that pep8/pyflakes checking with emacs (and probably VI), too. See http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2010/05/11/pep8-pyflakes-emacs.html

Django-counters - Boaz Leskes¶

Boaz told something about pycounters already in today’s django profiling talk and now he showed some screenshots of django-counters’ output. Django-counters is the pycounters version for Django.

You can get to know important stuff about production like number of requests and time requests take and so. He wants to turn django-counters into an easily installable app (for pycounters you need to install munin for visualization).

Vision is for itn to be easy to use. View stats in the admin. And… he wants help building it. You can give him help on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/bleskes/pycounters .

(Note: my brother also had a blog entry about Boaz’ work: http://maurits.vanrees.org/weblog/archive/2011/10/pun#boaz-leskes-pycounters ).