Noemi Millman: Triopter: Category Archives for "django"

I’ve said before that I’m only a moderately experienced programmer.  One of the things I’m enjoying about learning Django is that it’s challenging me to pick up new concepts without getting bogged down in the details of implementation.
Yesterday I ran across decorators.  I had no idea what a decorator is, how it works, or what it’s used for.  Wikipedia offers an overview, which at least explains the general purpose, but then someone tells me that Python decorators are not the same thing.  The top Google results fly way over my head, and finally, I land on an …

Well, I’ve built a basic blog application in Django, complete with comments (and comment moderation), categories, and date-based archives, that would actually be presentable on a public-facing website. It took a total of about 8 hours, and I’m very impressed with the framework.

My previous praise of the documentation was a little premature. The docs are a thousand times more approachable than RoR’s, and better categorized and stuff. But they’re very lacking in descriptions of syntax, or real-world examples, and in a few cases are out of date.

I spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to get …

Well, I’ve finished the beginner tutorials for both Django and Ruby on Rails, now.

I’d actually gone a bit further with Rails, beginning an attempt at writing an app, and then pulling up short for lack of clear documentation on working with many-to-many relationships, but that was a while ago, and the docs are a bit better now.

One thing that’s clear both from the types of tutorials they give and from the structure of the frameworks is that they were developed for different purposes.

Django was, as it claims, created for developing CMSes for content-heavy sites. It’s super easy to display …