Simon Willison’s Weblog

Two months with Ruby on Rails. Good rant—covers both the good and the bad. The first complaint is the lack of XSS protection by default in the template language. Django has the same problem, but the solution was 90% there when I saw Malcolm at OSCON.

# 9th October 2007, 12:23 pm / django, python, rails, ruby, security, xss

tranquil. Inspired take on the Django ORM to SQLAlchemy problem: lets you define your models with the Django ORM but use SQLAlchemy to run queries against them.

# 9th October 2007, 2:30 am / django, djangoorm, models, orm, python, sqlalchemy, tranquil

DbMigration—a schema migration tool for Django. Nice and simple tool for adding schema migrations to a Django application.

# 27th September 2007, 3:04 pm / django, djangoorm, schema-migrations, orm, python, sql

djangogigs.com—from idea to release in 6 hours. Now that’s what I call rapid development.

# 26th September 2007, 4:53 pm / django, django-gigs, rapiddevelopment

Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers.

# 22nd September 2007, 12:01 pm / django, gridcontainer, hosting, mediatemple, virtualization

Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).

# 14th September 2007, 3:20 pm / django, djangonauts, python, zope, zope3

Restructured Text to Anything. Slick set of online tools for converting Restructured Text (one of the more mature wiki-style markup languages) to HTML or PDF. Includes a nice looking API. Powered by Django.

# 13th September 2007, 3:54 pm / django, html, pdf, python, restructuredtext

django-sphinx (via) More code from Curse Gaming; this time a really nice API for adding Sphinx full-text search to a Django model.

# 9th September 2007, 12:35 am / cursegaming, david-cramer, django, full-text-search, orm, python, search, sphinx-search

Advanced Django. Slides from my hour long tutorial at PyCon UK this morning. Most of the material was adapted from OSCON, but I also added a new section covering newforms.

# 8th September 2007, 1 pm / django, newforms, pyconuk, pyconuk2007, python, slides, slideshare, my-talks, tutorial

Django on Jython: What I’ve done until now. It’s not quite there yet (the new Jython is Python 2.2 with a few 2.3 features; Django requires 2.3 at least) but it’s looking pretty promising.

# 4th September 2007, 2:53 am / django, java, jython, python

Django vs feedparser on dates. Some useful tips in the comments. I find Python’s timezone stuff endlessly frustrating: I know it can do what I want, but it always takes me a ridiculously long time to figure out the necessary incantations.

# 2nd September 2007, 10:17 am / datetime, django, feedparser, python, timezones

A Django Cache Status. Django view to display stats pulled from your memcached server.

# 25th August 2007, 2:08 pm / django, fredrik-lundh, memcached

Satchmo 0.5 Release. Django powered e-commerce application, “the webshop for perfectionists with deadlines”.

# 22nd August 2007, 10:36 pm / django, python, releases, satchmo

Django and the iPhone tutorial. How to install SSH, Python and Django on your iPhone and get Django running against the call database. Less complicated than I expected.

# 21st August 2007, 11:34 am / django, iphone, jay-baird, tutorial

BabelDjango. Tools for integrating Christopher Lenz’s Babel i18n framework with Django.

# 20th August 2007, 2:59 pm / babel, christopher-lenz, django, i18n, python

Django on the iPhone. Jacob got it working. The next image in his photostream shows the Django admin application querying his phone’s local database of calls.

# 19th August 2007, 7:58 am / apple, django, django-admin, iphone, jacob-kaplan-moss, python

Changeset 5925. You can now register custom commands for your application with Django’s manage.py script. More sensible than littering your application’s root directory with shell scripts.

# 18th August 2007, 11:06 am / django, managepy, python

AuditTrail. Add change tracking and history to a Django model with a single line of code. Doesn’t handle relationships though, which is definitely the toughest part of this problem.

# 15th August 2007, 1 pm / audittrail, django, history, orm, python

Finding Lookup Items that Are Not Used. How to do left outer joins (and other custom SQL) using the Django ORM.

# 13th August 2007, 5:08 pm / django, michael-trier, orm, python, sql

Ubuntu -- python-django. Sweet, Django 0.96 is packaged for Ubuntu Gutsy.

# 11th August 2007, 8:47 am / django, gutsy, python, ubuntu

A nice example of when to use reduce in python. As a shortcut for assembling a large OR query using the Django ORM.

# 2nd August 2007, 11:51 pm / django, orm, python, reduce

Django, iCal and vObject. Easy iCal generation for Django using vObject.

# 1st August 2007, 11:09 am / derek-willis, django, icalendar, python, vobject

Java’s Fear of Commitment (via) How Java culture emphasises interfaces and layers of abstraction over solving problems directly.

# 1st August 2007, 10:32 am / django, java

Django weekly roundup: July 30. Every active open source project needs something like this.

# 30th July 2007, 5:03 pm / clint-ecker, django, open-source

mod_wsgi 1.0 Release Candiate Available. mod_wsgi is shaping up to be an excellent alternative to mod_python.

# 26th July 2007, 8:21 pm / django, modpython, modwsgi, python, wsgi

Instant Django. Portable Django environment for Windows, no installation required. Can also be run from a USB thumb drive.

# 24th July 2007, 6:49 pm / django, instantdjango, python, usb, windows

Django Master Class. Notes and slides from the OSCON tutorial I gave yesterday with Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeremy Dunck.

# 24th July 2007, 3:20 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, jeremy-dunck, oscon, oscon07, python, speaking, my-talks, tutorial

Undelete in Django. Inspired by the conversation about undo the other day, Nathan Ostgard created a simple solution based around custom managers and a trashed_at model field.

# 20th July 2007, 6:54 pm / custommanagers, django, nathan-ostgard, orm, python, undelete, undo

Seasoning Templates. “Designing a template language is a lot like seasoning a dish; there’s a whole range of tastes out there.”

# 19th July 2007, 6:04 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, templates