Day two … that means we all survived the evening of day one at Clärchens Ballhaus. As the name indicates, this is not your typical bar or restaurant but actually a dance hall with room for more than 100 people at tables and enough room for those who also want to dance. A big thank you, again, to Jesper and Bitbucket for sponsoring the drinks.
Keynotes
As every good day does, day two started with Keynotes. This time by CouchDB’s Jan Lehnardt who reminded us about one of the major corner stones of good design - no matter if its graphical or technical: Simplicity
If you keep solutions simple, yet effective, you usually also produce code with less bugs since the number of errors per Klines of codes is rather constant (~ 10-25). And here it doesn’t really matter what programming language you use or what framework.
As an example for simplicity Jan mentioned the mustache template engine (for which he maintains a JavaScript port where it showed that keeping out features actually produced a much cleaner solution.
Gunicorn, Django and WSGI
Next was Benoît Chesneau who gave a presentation of WSGI, how it plays with Django and how to deploy them using Gunicorn. The first part of the talk consisted of a short summary on WSGI. Next he introduced us to two ways on how to mix Django with “native” WSGI applications: twod.wsgi and django-wsgi.
Having WSGI is not worth a thing if you can’t deploy WSGI apps. So Benoît gave an overview of some of the servers out there with support for Python’s “web protocol”: uwsgi, which is an “extension” for NGINX; mod_wsgi for Apache HTTPD and various “native” projects like cherrypy, spawning, paster and, naturally, Gunicorn.
Django CMS
Patrick Lauber was next with a presentation of Django CMS complete with tons of feature presentation and demos.
I haven’t used it yet but it definitely looks interesting esp. since there are even people out there writing extensions for it.
No! Bad pony
Dr Russell Keith-Magee gave an updated version of his famous “No! Bad Pony!” talk. And here is the original:
MongoDB
The first talk after lunch was by Peter Bengtsson and about how to use MongoDB with Django. After a short crash course to MongoDB he went right into all the options you have if you want to get more NoSQL into your django project with solutions like Ming, mongoengine or django-mongokit. django-mongokit even offers integration with signals and test-databases , the latter I’m really missing sometimes in mongoengine.
And I’m pleased that I seem to have taken the right way with mongoengine for this site ;-)
Django South
Next, Andrew Godwin presented what has changed within Django South over the last two years and his plans for the future. Sadly, during his talk I was mostly on the hunt for some free powerplug I will simply link to one of Reinout’s excellent summaries.
(Perhaps I should change to this format, too ;-))
Django Technical Design Panel
The last official talk for today was a technical design panel with Jacob, Russel and Jannis and Alex acting as moderator and presenting community question. A short summary of what I could hear from the back of the room:
- Jacob would like the middleware API to be completely rewritten and renamed and URLconf to be improved.
- Russell wants some async support inspired by how node.js does it.
- The way project templates are handled in Rails is something Jacob would like to see in Django.
- The first goal regarding Django on Python 3.x is to get a working distribution out there that allows the community to provide usable bug reports.
- The way, Django apps are found by users could be improved and the ultimate goal should be to come up with a system that can be used by Django as well as by Python as a whole since the problems are mostly the same.
- The DVCS mirrors should get listed on djangoproject.com
Lightning talks
- Continuous integration with Hudson by Erik Romijn
- Lightning Fast Shop
- No love for generic views and flatpages from Stijn Debrouwere
- Django-ROA by David Larlet
- I18n content by using the sites framework by Stefan Wehrmeyer
- An introduction to Flask by Armin Ronacher
- Deployment tips by Thilo Fromm
- An introduction to software licensing by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
- A call for action for a project related to Tibetan Buddism by Tomas Juriga
OK, enough for today and on to hopefully more photos tomorrow :-)
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