Posts for Django
Django Template Tag Namespaces Now Possible
I've been interested in the Django template language for some time now, and I've admired much of its simplicity and extendibility. I even wrote a shell for it (screencast) and a two-phase template renderer. Having spent the time to understand how it works, I've also had my share of ideas on how to improve it (addition of "elif", mathematical operations in variable tags, namespaces). The pony that I've been wanting the most is probably namespaces. There has been talk of adding namespaces to Django templates for quite a while (including a ticket with patches and some various discussions on the mailing list (1, 2 and 3)). For years, this concept has sat dormant due to lack of discussion and interest. No pluggable solution had been offered (as far as I know), so I wrote a couple of templatetags that offer namespacing and other features while retaining backwards compatibility and not requiring a fork of Django. This code is available on Github as django-smart-load-tag.
Screencast - django-template-repl
Django-template-repl is a unique project aimed at providing debugging tools for the Django template language. I did a screencast to highlight its features.
Thread-Safe Object-Oriented Views in Django
An emerging design pattern in Django is the usage of class-based views. Writing views as classes is made possible by Python features that allow classes and objects to behave as callables, just like functions. They can help organize view code and promote reusability by offering a greater level of customization. However, callable objects sometimes have thread safety issues that developers are often not aware of.
Evaluating Django Caching Options
Caching is one of the first things you can do when you need to start thinking about scaling. Among efforts such as query minimization, denormalization, code optimizations, compression, database tuning, indexing, and load balancing, caching remains one of the lowest hanging fruits in methods to lighten your server load and handle huge amounts of traffic. There are many options, and I chose to evaluate a few of the most interesting setups.
Django Template Debugging Made Easier with django-template-repl
When working with the Django template language, specifically writing template tags or trying out new template tags that are not well documented, it's easy to fall into a testing loop that involves modifying your code, saving the file, causing runserver to restart, which could take some time for large projects, switching to your web browser, hitting reload, and viewing the results. This workflow can be repetitive and unproductive. I decided to improve template interpreter interactivity by writing a REPL for it, and I released the project as django-template-repl, which is freely available on Github and PyPI. I was surprised and happy to see it was well accepted judging from the twitter chatter and github statistics, so I wrote this to better explain how to use it.
Introduction to Surlex Slides from Djangocon 2009
I have uploaded my slides from my lightning talk on Surlex at Djangocon 2009.
Introduction to Surlex
Surlex (Simple URL Expression) is a language for matching and extracting text, similar to regex (regular expression). It works by generating a regular expression from a more concise syntax that is designed to produce easy-to-read url patterns.