Let the buzz over Django begin. I first saw it fly by very early this morning as Clint Ecker pointed to some documentation. Simon Willison has given it a proper introduction this morning.
I definitely need to take a close look at Django if it can approach the productivity of Rails while speaking my native Python. I could be missing something, but I think one very important thing that Django needs in order to have that running start in development productivity is to ship with a small HTTP server available by default. Rails uses WEBrick for this and allows development without the need to mess with Apache or lighttpd in order to start coding. It should be trivial to add similar functionality to Django (with CGIHTTPServer and all).
I don’t mean to rag on the new framework on the block. I think Django has a ton of potential. It’s off to the right start, having been extracted from a working environment being worked on by some really smart people.
We’ll see how this turns out, but I’m extremely excited.
I couldn’t agree more about the native Python web server for getting started quickly. At the moment you have to install and configure mod_python, which is a bit of a nightmare (at least on OS X). Although Django itself grew up separately from Rails, you can be sure we’ll be borrowing a lot of ideas from Rails in the future, especially with regards to marketing, documentation and smart tools.
Adrian’s working on WSGI support which will allow Django to sit on top of any WSGI compliant server implementation - as soon as he’s got that going adding BaseHTTPServer (and FastCGI and Twisted and so on) support will be pretty trivial.
This was pretty cool. I started hearing about Django today, which at first seemed like a Rails clone for Python, but has actually been in use for a couple of years, and it’s finally getting an official public release any day now.
The cool part was…
Well, one week later and “django-admin.py runserver” does what you ask for.