[Grok-dev] Python UK meeting and Django

[Kevin Smith]

Peter Bengtsson wrote:
> Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
> success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
> of the questions:
> "What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
> His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> developers whereas Django is for users".
> I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
> board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
> is that already what we're doing?
<rant>
That kind of put down burns me up.

Lately I've been playing with DJango and CherryPy to take advantage of 
Google AppEngine technology and it feels like it's 10 years behind 
Grok/Zope3.  Has he gone through the tutorial lately?

"Design your URLs"

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'mysite.views.year_archive'),
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'mysite.views.month_archive'),
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'mysite.views.article_detail'),
)

C'mon regexp dispatching? GROK SMASH.

Views:

def year_archive(request, year):
    a_list = Article.objects.filter(pub_date__year=year)
    return render_to_response('news/year_archive.html', {'year': year, 'article_list': a_list}) render_to_response (blah, blah,blah.... what??

render_to_response blah blah is better for users? GROK SMASH

Templates:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block title %}Articles for {{ year }}{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Articles for {{ year }}</h1>

{% for article in article_list %}
<p>{{ article.headline }}</p>
<p>By {{ article.reporter.full_name }}</p>
<p>Published {{ article.pub_date|date:"F j, Y" }}</p>
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}

Yeah, stick that in your DreamWeaver. GROK SMASH

And "This is Just the Surface".
Yeah, don't forget to install Apache, mod_python, psycopg2/posgresql, 
and set your PYTHONPATH to include DJango/create a symbolic link to 
DJango. Cuz that's what users like to do. :) GROK SMASH

Wait until you find out all the stuff they still can't do that Zope  
already discovered, solved and refactored 10 years ago.

There's a whole lotta Django apps that could be written super-easy on 
Zope2, but.... where's all the python code. Don't need much really... 
Hmmm... but I wanna write python code....

They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a 
mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong 
community development skills.

Perhaps grok is being too nice. GROK SMASH YET ANOTHER ROR RIPOFF.
</rant>

Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready. 
Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to 
an RDB.

No hard feelings. :)

Kevin Smith