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Interview: Andrew Godwin

Andrew Godwin will enlighten the FOSDEM 2011 audience about Django.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Well, I've been writing open-source software for the last seven years and Python for the last four or five of those; while you can usually find me doing freelance web development, I'm currently working with a mixture of both operations and web development for my new startup, ep.io.

I tend to use Django in most of my work, but I do try and keep abreast of other frameworks, especially where something a little less massive than Django is required. I also enjoy playing around with new databases and datastores, cheese, and mountains.

What aspects of Django's architecture will you cover in your talk?

It's more of a broad overview; while the talk will be technical, I don't expect that many people to be familiar with anything beyond the basic layout of Django's internals. I want to address each of the major parts of Django as a framework - the model layer, the templating layer, HTTP and URL handling, and so on - and take a look at their individual design, how other libraries and frameworks have done it better, how Django chose surprisingly well, or (in many cases) how we adapted.

What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk ? What do you expect?

I'm not sure what I expect - introducing people to Django is always nice, but a lot of people have heard of it these days. I'd say I see it more as showing people the classic cases where things can go wrong in an open-source project like this - some are web-specific, some are not.

Still, Django has a lot of history - almost 6 years, now - and in that time we've managed to massively overhaul parts of the framework while keeping backwards compatibility. There's lessons to be learnt about being flexible, and adapting and fixing problems, but not rewriting everything all at once. Django really is quite a nice framework, at the end of the day, even after all the flaws I'll be discussing - a lot of them are historical.

Those flaws -- the 'bad/ugly' parts of Django's architecture -- do you consider those to be fixable?

Well, of the non-historical issues I'll be discussing, some of them can be fixed relatively soon - in the next release or two, perhaps - while others are perhaps more fundamental, and would have to accompany a release with a significant drop in backwards-compatibility. We've not really discussed if, or indeed when, such a release would happen.

So there are already ideas brewing for Django post-v1.3?

Of course - there are too many! 1.3 was supposed to mostly be a bug-fixing release, although several medium-size feature changes have snuck in. There's a whole host of ideas for 1.4 and beyond - template compiler improvements, adding some migration support into Django itself, making the auth app more reusable, and others. We won't decide what goes in the next release until 1.3 is released and everyone's had a bit of a rest, however.

Which properties of Python make it a nice language to write a framework in?

I'd say it's a combination of the huge number of libraries available (there's at least one for everything), its relative ubiquity (I can't think of a mainstream distribution of Linux that hasn't shipped with Python in the last few years), and the relatively clean and consistent code that gets produced - there's a pretty well-adopted core set of code conventions (PEP8) that means nearly all Python code looks the same.

It's also quite an accessible language, which helps bring fresh talent to the various Python communities. Still, there's definitely also the fact that it's popular because... it's popular. Having a large community to draw on for support and development resources seems to just drive the language forward more and more.

For some frameworks, it seems that the bigger they get, the more alternatives pop up for some of their subsystems. Is this true for Django too?

I'd say it's not the framework getting bigger that's necessarily the direct cause - as more people become familiar with a language, more frameworks and libraries are going to spring up. It's definitely true for Django, however - most of what's in the framework is also available elsewhere as a separate library, or often as several competing libraries.

Still, I think this is a good thing. Competition, as well as new ideas from those other alternatives, help us see what's popular and what isn't. If we genuinely thought an external solution was better than our subsystem (and that includes integrating with the other parts of Django with only a reasonable amount of code), it'd be considered for inclusion - after all, it's less code for us to maintain. That said, backwards compatibility means such an inclusion is unlikely, except with new features or parts.

You work a lot on South (schema and database migration for Django). What makes migrations hard, and how does Django/South help?

Databases themselves are mostly what make migrations hard - they're not particularly happy with changing their schema in the first place, and on top of that, each database has a different syntax and different restrictions (or, in the case of SQLite, an inability to do basically anything other than add columns). The hardest part of South is maintaining those abstractions to the different databases.

There's also the element of organisation that South solves for you, by tracking what's applied. That's not necessarily as difficult for the developer to do, but it's tedious, and a small mistake can result in the database schema being changed in unintended ways. I wanted to remove that element of risk, and apparently a lot of other people agree with me.

How would you describe the Django community?

It's fantastic. We have a great core team, and a good community of people around that, not only contributing patches and reporting bugs, but also helping by writing documentation, running conferences, supporting other users, giving us constructive criticism, promoting Django, or just writing great sites using it. It's everything I could ask for from an open-source community.

Nice to hear. You're also working on a hosting service for Python apps (ep.io). Is it any different to develop for a hosting platform versus standard web/framework programming?

It depends if you're talking about developing applications to run on the hosting platform, or developing the hosting platform itself. Developing applications to run on ep.io is almost identical to normal web development - that's one of the design goals, and there's only a few small restrictions to keep things portable. Some other hosting platforms require significant changes to your code to get it to run, but it's usually to make it easier for them to scale your app; we went for the route that gives us the hard work, not the users.

Developing the platform itself, on the other hand, has been very interesting, mostly since I finally get to use a whole heap of core Linux functionality and system calls that have no use in normal programs, as well as the inherent difficulty in testing and optimising a distributed, self-healing system. I consider this fun; other people probably have a different opinion.

OK, thanks!