Category Archives: Milestones

Milestone: First Django Application Ever

I finally deployed a Django application to a public facing Linux server. You can read all about it in a write up below. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Django is another ‘rapid application development’ web framework that comes with all sorts of useful tools to help web application developers get their software finished faster. Some of these time saving features include an auto generated administration tool, an ORM object mapper, and a template engine.

So how does developing on Django compare with development on ASP.NET? Well, for non-MS Office related development I would say it is faster and more suitable for custom applications. Alot of this has to do with the object relational mapper, which accomplishes the same things as Microsoft’s Dlinq, and the generated admin tool. These two features alone completely remove a large amount of coding that usually has to be done when creating an ASP.NET application.

I highly recommend anyone out there give Django a try. Check out this tutorial for a quick introduction.

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New Milestone: My First Linux Application

TuxLast night I finished my first program that runs on Linux. If you haven’t guessed yet, its built on the PostgreSQL and Python application stack. The program is a server that checks and updates different files, while at the same time, has the ability to accept remote connections through telenet for administering the server.

I can’t go into deeper details about what the program does because of an agreement with my employers, however, I can talk about what I had to learn in order to put everything together. Later on in the week, I plan on posting a write up on Python and the Twisted Framework. While researching Twisted, it was maddening at the sparse amount of example code for some parts of the framework.  For me, it was authentication and integration of application code outside of protocols. Even now after completing everything, I’m still clueless on a whole slew of issues. I know most of the nerds out there will just say, ‘So? why don’t you just read through the source? It’s on your computer in plain sight.’ Since I’m still new to Python, reading through the source for the frameworks is like reading Chinese. As I’ve mentioned before, it all looks like a hodgepodge of pseudo code.