Djangocon.eu - Day 3

To get the usual recap from last night out of the way: Last night was no organized social event, so social drinking games and no way too motivated people dancing. Instead it was an evening full of small groups exploring the city on a quest to find some beer and some food. Armin, Arne, Arthur, some guy who isn’t on Twitter and me went down Warschauer Straße and found some nice (I guess) Spanish restaurant called Cayetano with some comfy tables outdoors. I’m always amazed how much a mess Nachos with cheese and chicken can become when I’m near them.

So, now that this is out of the way, let’s get to what happened at Djangocon.eu on day 3.

---

Relax with CouchDB

And on to more NoSQL with Benoît Chesneau giving an introduction to CouchDB, what its all about and how you can use it easily within your Django project. He also mentioned some of the “more recent” development around Couch like couchdb-lounge for clustering and the new geo indexer GeoCouch.

I also wasn’t aware that couchdbkit was that tightly integrated with Django, offering for instance a counterpart to ModelForms. Plans for the next version of couchdbkit go even further with support for the admin app and MultiDB.

Release management with capistrano and supervisord

Maciej Pasternacki of SetJam.com described how they do release management using Capistrano and Supervisord. Capistrano was chosen because of some nice support for transactional deployment and simply because it is more mature than the competition. Dependency management with upstream libraries is handled not with the usual suspects like pip, buildout etc. but with custom Makefiles [which I personally thought to be a bit weird]. For scaling he recommended django-sqs and capistrano-ec2group to deployment to EC2.

Design for Developers

Next was Idan Gazit’s attempt on teaching software developers some design tricks to make our websites suck less visually. The goal here were minimalistic designs since they provide less opportunity to suck. Just to sum up a few tips:

• Make it clear for people what the actual content of your page is. You can do that by testing it yourself by squinting. If you can still detect the content area right away, you’ve succeeded.
• Use enough white space
• Provide enough contrast
• Design with a grid in mind
• Text content should not be wider than 2 alphabets
• Don’t use more than 2 or 3 typefaces.
• Regarding colours you should know your audience since some colours can have unexpected meanings depending on the user’s culture

Efficient Django Hosting for the Masses

Michael P. Jung of PyRox gave an overview on how they try to provide a shared-hosting infrastructure for people who don’t want or need a VPS or root server. From what I understood there each user gets her own Apache server instance with mod_wsgi and nginx as server in front of all those Apache instances. They also did some filesystem as well as database replication.

NoSQL panel

Do you want to support special NoSQL feature within the ORM even if they cannot be mimicked in SQL?

No

How many NoSQL databases should Django support if any?

Ideally all of them but there should perhaps first happen some kind of standardization with regards to queries.

How much abstraction (should it emulate joins)?

There are too few commonalities to really go beyond something like get_by_pk or querying simple lists.

What are the approaches by other high-level frameworks?

AFAWK it is not on their agenda right now.

This should not discourage people from using NoSQL with Django right now .

Red Square

Red Square is an internal “social networking” application at BMW being in development since 2007. Jörg Kress presented the reasons for it and how basically the upper management was involved in getting this project going.

Testing

Eric Holscher had the honor of giving the last talk at Djangocon.eu 2010 where he went into detail on testing infrastructures with great stuff like Hudson and devmason and some tools in general like django-kong and patu.

He also has a rather big Pony: There should be only one way on how to run tests on newly downloaded Django apps. He proposed python setup.py test since this has a good chance to end up in Python’s stdlib when distutils2 and related efforts land.

Lightning talks

• P2P Web Applications with CouchDB by Jan Lehnardt
• Logic-less templates with {{ mustaches }} by Jan Lehnardt
• Ray’s Widget Exchange by Russell Keith-Magee on his vision about seeing a widget repository implemented
• Patches Welcome! by Ville Säävuori
• Demoserver by Remco Wendt
• Localized documentation by me
• Continuous Performance Testing by Lukasz Dobrzanski
• Hidden Hires — Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Eric Holscher, Idan Gazit on a new job platform for Django companies and developers
• Mockity mock mock – a little love for the mock library by Konrad Delong
• Easy package releasing with zest.releaser by Reinout van Rees
• A Quick Look at the django-cms by Jonas Obrist
• Surprise act (acapella of Code Monkey) by Remco Wendt and friends