Notes from PySIG, 23-Sept-2010: Bill Freeman and Django

[Ted Roche]

Seven folks attended the September meeting of the Python Special
Interest Group, pysig.org, held as usual on the 4th Thursday of the
month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester. Bill Sconce,
PySIG's organizer, supplied milk and Janet supplied (excellent!)
chocolate chip cookies.

Bill Freeman was the presenter for the night, and spoke about Django.
Django [2] is a web framework written in Python. It supports the WSGI
web server gateway interface specification which allows a standard way
of connecting to web servers and provides facilities to "stack"
additional WSGI-compliant applications to act as filters, caches,
security modules, etc. between the web server and your application. Bill
walked through the flow of data through the application's architecture
from http request, through parsing, views and the template language,
processing in the ORM and out as the http response. There are hooks
galore where you can add your own code, modifying the flow of data and
responses. Django is a world-class web framework, with facilities to
plug in additional "engines" -- mini-applications -- and add your own
template tags, customize the automated generate of the data schema, and
of course, write your own application logic. It's Open Source, it's
Python, and the code is there for you to mess with. Django's most
popular add-on provides an administrative function that provides
developers (and, optionally, their customers) with simple
add/edit/delete forms. Django seems to be a platform well worth
considering if you're interested in web apps in Python. Bill's slides
are available on the GNHLUG wiki at the link below.

Thanks to Bill Freeman for a great presentation, to Bill Sconce for
organizing the meeting, to Janet for the awesome cookies, and to the
Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the fine facilities.

[1] Slides: http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PySIGDjango
[2] http://www.djangoproject.com/

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com