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Husband, Father, Coach, Little League President, Python Dev, Javascript Explorer, HTML5 Believer, Periodic Project Manager, .NET Vet, Occasional Speaker, Sometimes Leader, Sometimes Follower, Always a Team Player

Thoughts

Django Notes

  • Testing Django can be somewhat challenging. Instead of simply running a unittest module, you need to run the manage.py script in your Django app passing it the “test” parameter. This sets up a test database for your model, runs your tests against that model and then destroys your database. In effect, it turns your unit tests into functional tests.
  • Another item regarding testing that bothers me is the hoops you have to jump through in order to use a testing framework other than unittest. We want to use Nose for our project and getting it to run in the Django environment requires that we install a Django App (django-nose) in our Project, and then make a couple of changes in our project settings file. I admit it doesn’t sound too bad, but when you compare it to the ease of simply running “nosetest” the story is not nearly as compelling.
  • Putting testing aside for the moment, the rest of Django has been a pretty good experience. Both the templating language and the models are simple to learn and start using right away. Even though Django favors configuration over convention, the amount of configuration necessary is relatively small and hasn’t been much of a burden.
  • I hate the fact that urls can't be mapped to different view methods based on their method (GET, POST, etc). I often times find myself with overly complex view methods. You can improve this with a bit of code, but it's not inherent in the system.
  • Though not specifically Django related, I feel Nosy is worth mentioning. I’ve become addicted to this script (go here for the original post) written by Jeff Winkler a few years ago. Like many others, I’ve taken the original script and modified it suit the needs of my project. In short, Nosy is a script that runs Nose anytime a python file in a given directory changes. It’s essentially like having a mini-ci server running on your desktop. I’ve found it very freeing to simply write code and be instantly notified if something breaks. No switching windows to run a test.
  • As I mentioned before, the testing story for Django is not ideal. But this doesn’t mean you can’t improve the situation. I’ve made sure that the code going into our views.py file (which interestingly enough is really a controller) as close to pure framework code as I can. Most of my complexity is stored in a separate module that can be easily tested with Nose. To allow for even better testing, I make sure that all of the methods in the extra module accept a model as a parameter making mocking the models possible.
  • In summation, Django absolutely makes creating websites much easier. Though testing is challenging, you can improve upon it if you put some though into it. Would I recommend Django? If you’re already comfortable in Python, than absolutely. If not, I’m not so sure. Rails is a compelling option and Node.js is making a lot of noise.