canonical-django team mailing list archive

[Szilveszter Farkas <szilveszter.farkas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From May 24 to 26, we (Łukasz Czyżykowski and Szilveszter Farkas)
attended the European Django conference (DjangoCon.eu -
http://djangocon.eu/) in Berlin.

There was only a single track of presentations, and in this report we
tried to highlight some of the more interesting talks. Most of them are
already up on http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/ to watch.

The prevailing topic of the conference was integrating NoSQL databases
with Django. Something on which developers will be focusing for the next
year or so.


Monday

Keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Django is very successful, just as Rails
is, but also faces the same problems Rails does: language in flux;
microframeworks, community fracture, stressful relationship between
framework and language community. We're also in the times when the web
itself is in flux (NoSQL, CSS3, local storage, web sockets, async
backends, etc.). Jacob challenged the community to be modest, bring in
more developers, re-up on reputation, don't rest on laurels, and engage
better with the Python community.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3674233/


Armin Ronacher: WSGI in Python 3. If I had to summarize the message of
the talk: it's a disaster. WSGI itself is slightly flawed, but situation
in Python 3 is even worse. Basically it's broken because of the unicode
related changes. Web developers should have been participating in the
transition process. Now, most of the CGI and HTTP related modules are
broken in the standard library. Time to fix those!

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3677288/
http://www.slideshare.net/mitsuhiko/wsgi-on-python-3


Alex Gaynor: NoSQL in Django. The plan is to support NoSQL databases as
new database backends, so everything that comes with Django, would work
transparently (admin, forms, serializers, model validation, etc.). Alex
spoke about the various layers of the Django ORM, and how they should be
changed to support NoSQL. As part of Google Summer of Code, and MongoDB
backend is being developed.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3676960/
http://www.slideshare.net/kingkilr/making-django-and-nosql-play-nice


Honza Král: Testing Django applications. Talked about the differences
between unit tests and integration tests, and how to write code that's
more testable, what's the best way to populate the test database, and
shared some tricks about testing forms. He encouraged web developers to
not only use Selenium or Windmill to test JavaScript, but also unit test
it. He's also advised not to use doctests.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3677324/
http://www.slideshare.net/honzakral/testing-4292655


Tuesday

Keynote by Jan Lenhardt (CouchDB) on Simplicity. Developers are also
designers (supported by a quote from Steve Jobs: "Design is how it
works"). If you write less code, you'll have less bugs -- there's a
metric (number of bugs per 1K lines of code) which is quite static, but
the more code you have, the worst the ratio gets. Terrifying example:
Rails' ORM (ActiveRecord) has twice the lines of code CouchDB has. To
me, the essence of the talk was another great quote (this time by Alan
Kay): "[For] any product: simple things should be easy, and hard things
should be possible." In that regard, Ubuntu is going in the perfect
direction.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3680798/
http://jan.prima.de/djangocon-eu.html


Patrick Lauber: Django CMS - An introduction. I was pretty amazed how
much Django CMS has come since I last saw it (version 1.0). It has
basically everything that a modern CMS should have: very flexible menu
system, plugin system for placeholders (blocks on the page), but my
favourite was the same concept that currently only exists as a closed
source Drupal module (installed by IO1 on our current websites): the
ability to edit blocks of text on a page inline.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3680940/
http://www.slideshare.net/digi604/django-cmskey


Russell Keith-Magee: No! Bad Pony! or, Explaining Django's development
process. Bad pony is idea which will not be implemented in Django. That
can be because of various reasons: solves problem which doesn't exist,
changes design contract of existing parts, addresses only small part of
larger issue or is architecture astronautic. But other ideas, when
properly championed and showed that they work (preferably by
implementation) have good chance of getting in.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3681168/


Andrew Godwin: South, New and Old. As author described it, it's VCS for
db schema, something which Django lacks by itself. Something which
Django lacks by itself. This project is most feature full from the
available solutions. It's quite mature, being here for 2 years. Current
development plans are focused on splitting it into two parts, one which
would fit into Django and rest which would be schema evolution solution
itself. There was one unresolved question: how do you test migrations.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3680631/


Wednesday

Idan Gazit: Design for developers: Making your Frontend Suck Less.
Really interesting set of tips & tricks to make visual part of any web
app appealing. In my opinion this is something which every developer
should know, even if this stuff will be later corrected by design team.
It was really down to earth and practical.

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685673/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers


Eric Holscher: Getting the most out of your test suite. Blazing fast
tour on tools for getting more information from running test suite than
just fail/pass. Things showed there: continuous integration (new thing:
devmason), spidering the web app to look for broken links, dashboards
showing status of tests and production systems. All of that is practical
experience of Eric while working on Ellington (CMS from which Django
itself was extracted).

http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685913/
http://www.slideshare.net/ericholscher/making-the-most-of-your-test-suite


For the great finale was Code Monkey song
http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3687127/

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Quick conference statistics: around 120 attendees. 80% had Macs, but
roughly 80% of the rest had Ubuntu on their laptops (also saw a few
Ubuntu VMs on Macs).