Noticing the the Django book is final I began reading it today (I wanted to look into Django for some time now but never really came to it). Anyway the book is quite nice, easy reading with simple examples (a bit too targeted to beginners which I guess I am not really anymore).
To try the examples I downloaded the newest Django release (0.96.1 I think), untared it and started setup.py. Funny enough this simple step failed… After looking into the source of setup.py I noticed this line: package = dirpath[len_root_dir:].lstrip('/').replace('/', '.'). Being on Windows this of course failed and I changed it to ‘\\’. I guess one should use os.path.sep in this case so I decided to add a proper bug report to the Django Trac. Again this simple idea failed as my short post was not allowed as the system thought of it as spam 
So I gave up on this. Two simple things failing does demotivate me…
But I started reading the book anyway and tried the examples too (after the hacked install 
). Until Chapter 4 where I am currently it all makes sense (should do with Djangos good reputation). I am not quite sure if another templating system was needed though. I still prefer XSLT for templating as it gives me total freedom about the HTML and if the source XML is based on XHTML it is not even difficult to write or understand. A few well-placed added elements (in another namespace) do all what I want in theses cases (e.g. a menu renderer). Anyway Djangos templating and its philosophical background seem to make sense but look like JATS in the end.
As a side note, I use web.py at work for a small project at the moment. It works very well and XSLT usage was very simple to add. I guess Django is better for more complex apps but web.py is fine for simple stuff. Documentation is lacking though and I don’t think there will be any “web.pybook” soon
Another side note: Another project at work uses Wicket (Java Framework) which is not too nice for/to web developers, too difficult to really control HTML and Javascript. I do not have to do the backend here so that’s ok but still web.py and also Django look much much nicer and easier (no surprise really but anyway…).
you say not to nice for/to web developers? thats odd all the web designers i know love it because they can do exactly what they are good at. Designing html pages, but what javascript/html do you want to control use??
Comment by Johan Compagner — December 18, 2007 @ 2:21 pm
As a frontend developer I like to control any part of the HTML “completely” and it seemed that wicket made some parts not too easy. Also the separation between Java and HTML is not complete. Please don’t take my “complaints” too serious though…
But to give some examples:
1. Adding a CSS-class to an existing
BTW, something like “addCSSClass”/”removeCSSClass” would be a very helpful part of any web frameworks’ API I guess (maybe wicket has something like this but we have not found it yet).
2. Having an HTML
Comment by see — December 18, 2007 @ 9:11 pm