Though at my work I am java developer I am fond of python, and wanted to use python for developing dynamic parts of the site (like blog, poll, flickrbrowser).

At first I decided to find all applications that I need and combine them into single web site with consistent look and feel using paste . To my surprise most applications that I have found were just CGI-based web applications or scripts and I decided that it quite a lot of efforts to consistently combine them together.

I continued my investigation and found PyBlosxom . While this blog engine is quite simple and extensible by plugins it is not easy task to configure it properly. Besides at least four blogs mentioned on its users page switched to WordPress, that is written in php. But I don’t want php. One more important point that resources of my VPS are quite limited and it is not very wise to run php+mysql only for blog and python for other applications that I am going to develop.

Still investigating I found post in GvR’s blog about python web frameworks and somebody mentioned django in comments to this post. I had heard about it before, but thought that there is nothing special with it, just some combination of ORM and template library. But after reading very good opinions about it I decided to give it a try.

I was really amazed by this great framework. This exactly what I need. It allows to combine several applications in single site with little or no effort. Though all applications that you are able to see on this site were written by me almost from scratch (and this is different from my original intention to reuse applications as much as possible) it was so easy to create them and allows me to learn django better.
There are a lot of speculation that python should be promoted more aggressively and I think that django really can help python to become more widely-used language.

I imagine that as it becomes more popular a lot of django applications (like blog, forum, poll, CMS, image gallery, etc) will appear and instead of writing everything from scratch it will be possible to specify list of necessary applications (as eggs), configure them, write some base templates and CSS styles to unify look and feel and receive great dynamic web site.

Posted by on April 14, 2006  |  development, django, python, web

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