Notebook

Fort-night #1: Django web2py

25 Oct 2009 at 6 PM

Simon Willison (simonwillison.net) suggests I “hire a fort” for a week... all I've got is an office for one night and a simple quest: Build a Django app to power listofone.

Truthfully, Simon would probably classify this as more of a hack day than a /dev/fort, but hey I like punny plays on words. Especially, really geeky puns that only I get. So, fort-night it is.

I mentioned to Hilary Nelson that I wanted to rebuild my web site using Django and he offered to sit in. Knowing my web site would be better as a result, I agreed, and few days later Hilary and I gathered our laptops around his dinner table and dove into Django. Err, not quite. First we had to deal with a drunken pumpkin thief, then we needed to evaluate available alternatives before settled into Django.

Note: Evaluating web frameworks with Hilary is no simple task.

Four hours into our event we had a solid understanding of the first fifteen minutes of a web2py tutorial. With that, I made my way across town to my house, leaving listofone for another day.

Random thoughts on web2py:

Automatic migration of data models is magic. Unused columns aren't dropped, and old columns are re-purposed without being altered. Magic != pythonic.
Through the web editing is nice. Having worked in Zope for several years this was very desirable.
EditArea is an amazing browser based code editor written in javascript. If you want people to write code in a browser, include it. This is now integrated in our Zope 2 environment at work.
Web2py has quite a few functions with very short names. I'm sure this saves time, in turn, the code reads like my freshman year computer science projects.

Overall, web2py hit me the wrong way.

On Sunday I sat down and began building my Django app for listofone.com. Now, five days and three hours after our Fort-Night began, I am happily typing this entry in a Django admin interface. The whole process felt right, and I'm excited to build something else.