Adventures with Django

Touted as “The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”, Django is a python-based framework which provides clean urls, modularity, and a bunch of other things which should make it easy to create a site that Does The Right Thing. I won’t explain in detail how to start using the framework, because I wouldn’t be able to do the topic justice. The official Django documentation is actually quite thorough and easy on the eyes. It’s much better-looking than my blog theme, for sure… I should really get around to replacing it with a better one. For some crazy reason, I thought that getting a new phone number would be the perfect time to practice using an MVC-like pattern in Django. In Django, they use the terms Model, View, and Template… although that doesn’t really make a great acronym. In Ruby on Rails, the term MVC, short for Model, View, and Controller, is quite common. In Microsoft’s Silverlight and WPF, the de-facto analogy is “Model-View-ViewModel”, also known as MVVM. Whatever the heck you call it, the idea is to separate data into a “model”, and then have separate business logic (django: view, rails: controller, silverlight/wpf: viewmodel) layer and presentation layer (django: template, rails: view, silverlight/wpf: view)… which isn’t exactly a radical idea. But anyway… so I decided to jump in. The result is this: http://m.azuresky.ca/Gee3No Since I wasn’t familiar with the logic separation required and I was busy with work, I ended up being a month late and sending out the text messages late at night. Alas. There’s also some mod_rewrite magic to get the short URLs, which I should document at some point in the future. On the plus side, the python DB APIs made it easy to interact with the model – for example, I used the python API to load the users from my old phone’s contacts backup (in VCARD format on the memory stick) and to set permissions on what content users could see based on groups. Django also provides a nice admin interface on top of the model in exchange for a few minutes of setup, which came in quite handy.