Django

So... Django... Other than having a funny name, being followed fanatically by groupies, and not really being in use anywhere substantial (the website that ranks Django implementations is second on its own list...), looks pretty neat. As part of this whole project we are going to need to build a fairly large and complex website. The website will be responsible for very little that inst implemented in our actual product, but in my opinion it will offer another avenue for the collaboration our product so desperately needs, along with giving users a place to hangout and share their work. This big honking chunk of code - we now think - is going to be written in Django, and as I am blocked on all fronts that matter, this is where I'm going to be spending the next little bit of my time. I have played around with rails (which actually is depolyed places ;) ), and there are a lot of similarities. The Django guys very much (knowingly or not) copied and made small differences to the successful rails model. I have spent the last few days watching youtube video tutorials, reading up on django and hacking away on some test sites - and today I think I'm going to investigate forking django-cms. but there are a couple big things im noticing so far:

• A lot like the python community most of the fan boys haven't tried anything else
• The people who have tried other things (php frameworks, rails, etc) see django on par with rails (enter language war), but better than php
• The community of high school hackers is much bigger than in ruby world
• There is a general lack of professional programming training in the community. people can and are willing to help, but they figured it out in their basement after teaching themselves the language.

I am excited to add something new to my toolset though, which is fun! On another note, I will probably be heading to Toronto one of these days to sync up with Mike and hack a little bit together. We have been drifting a bit the last couple weeks, so it will be good to be in the same space.