Highlights from DjangoCon 2009

Long (long!) overdue, here’s a bunch of links that point to the good things I learned at djangocon.

Restful Ponies

Deploying Django

Talks about how they’re doing “repeatable, automated, isolated” deployments using Python tools. Don’t you wish we were rocking this on AMO?

Scaling Django

Pownce was serving hundreds of request/sec, thousands of db ops/sec, it can be done. It’s simple to do automatic caching and invalidation when your queries are going through the ORM, Django’s signals decouple the invalidation process from your update code. Using multiple databases with Django is not straightforward, but it’s getting easier with an SoC project that’s ready to merged in.

The Realtime Web

Showed how they created an IRC client in the browser over comet with Django on the backend. The browser and the app keep “persistent” connections to an orbited server that handles all the messy details so the app can pretend it’s really connected directly to the browser.

This coincided with the release of FriendFeed’s Tornado web server, which led to an interesting focus on async during the conference.

Using Django in Non-Standard Ways

Covers a lot of little hurdles that people might consider show-stoppers when using Django, how to overcome them. WSGI middleware is fun:

Pinax Tutorial

Pinax tries to be a collection of reusable apps that work well together, but it looks like you spend more time trying to configure things than actually making useful apps.