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There’s a useful and reasonably comprehensive history of Python web application framework development on the (revamped only yesterday) Pylons site: Pylons Historical Timeline

Despite the title, and despite the article being on the site of one of the frameworks discussed, it appears to be a reasonably uncontroversial and even-handed treatment. If you’re new to the convoluted world of Python web development, this should help you sort your Zopes from your Twisteds and your TurboGears from your Djangos. It also makes clear the purpose and role of the WSGI specification.

Absolutely hilarious. Cal Henderson (head of engineering at flickr.com and author of O’Reilly’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”) gave a talk at DjangoCon 2008, titled, provocatively enough, “Why I hate Django”. I saw the slides shortly after the talk and even without the accompanying narrative I was laughing out loud. I made a mental note to check YouTube at regular intervals in order to watch for a video of the talk, and sure enough here it is: Why I hate Django

Cal is the chief architect for a site that is built primarily using PHP and that during peak hours serves up to 35,000 photos per second, really, over 2 million per minute! It’s probably reasonable to conclude that he knows a thing or two about scalability. Prior to his talk Cal had apparently been “building a blog in Django” (you’ll understand the quote marks when you watch the video and the talk is based upon his experiences doing that, as well as his involvement with Django-powered Pownce.

It’s good natured stuff, and very funny.

Why I hate Django.

EDIT: I meant to add that I think it’s very cool the Django folks got Cal to do this talk. It seems to be a sign that they don’t take themselves or their framework *too* seriously, which can only be a good thing, IMO.  On a more serious note, the talk also serves as a pretty good introduction to advanced web database issues.

I’m ploughing through “Learning Python” in what little spare time I have these days, and so I was particularly interested to see this on the O’Reilly Radar site, an embed of Michael Ogawa’s Flash visualization movie of the development of the Python language based upon its source code repository history.

OK, that may not sound particularly exciting, but give it a whirl at full-screen, there’s something fascinating, organic and compelling about it. It’s particularly interesting to watch Python’s popularity explode in mid-2000.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Michael has created visualizations for the Apache, PostgreSQL and Eclipse projects as well.

Edit: From a comment left on the Radar site, it seems that the explosion of popularity in mid-2000 followed the movement of the Python CVS tree from a private server to a public one at SourceForge. It seems, therefore, that this video could also be billed as the effect on a project of such a move, itself a pretty interesting thing, not least because it is the visualization of a phenomenon that is slowly but surely has been steadily supplanting proprietary software as the dominant software creation model.

Ian Cottee gives some fascinating insights into how his company uses a combination of Python and Ruby to help manage the production processes at the Toyota car manufacturing plant at Derby, England.

He also talks about why he’s leaning towards Django and away from Rails these days - and has a link to Andy McKay’s blog which looks like one to subscribe to if you’re interested in Django (or Python in general for that matter). I’ve been watching Django with interest recently, and it’s one of the reasons behind my decision to target Python as my next technology to be learned.