In my earlier post, I was installing Django on Mac OS X by following their own tutorial partly to get a feel for the database site of the MVC framework. This was to evaluate whether I should use an off-the-shelf framework to just build my own. My requirements are:

• Easy to code.
• Preferably easy to manage the database and existing data.
• Preferably users, security etc for free.
• Reusable View components for menus etc.
• Quality framework-created database table structure.

I don’t want to write forms to manage the data or all the user and authentication and session stuff. I can, but I don’t want to.

After I followed the tutorial and inspected the database generated I could critically evaluate the framework.

Django’s model-generated-data

• Logically structured OK
• Table names are the same as the entity in the model, but by default prepended with the Django app name and lower-cased. (You can change the table name in the model.)
• Foreign-keys are generated and handled sensibly.
• There is also a Shell – which gives you programmatic access to the data model. It’s basically just a standard Python REPL with some extra enhancements for Django stuff.

Django’s Admin Site

• supports multiple users
• Seems to keep a history of the changes (the meta-data not the actual changes) as made in the Admin site.
• Intelligently builds the forms based on the data type in the model – dates have date pickers, strings have text inputs etc.

Views/URL Mappings

• Can be as simple as a return statement or return a render() method for an HTML template or any other Python library as long as it can fit into the HTTP response – JSON/PDF/HTML/media/whatever… From the website:

“Your view can read records from a database, or not. It can use a template system such as Django’s – or a third-party Python template system – or not. It can generate a PDF file, output XML, create a ZIP file on the fly, anything you want, using whatever Python libraries you want.

All Django wants is that HttpResponse. Or an exception.”

• URLs and parameters are mapped in a separate file which ‘captures’ parts of the GET request and converts parts of it to Python variables to pass along to the appropriate view method. It seems like you can have heaps of view methods all contained in different Python files, it’s just standard Python syntax to call things and pass data around. Possibly similar to other frameworks like ASP.net which also has URL mappings.

Things I’m not sure about yet

• Can you password protect an entire site? Like for an internal app?
• I read somewhere about reverse engineering an existing database or even generating an ER diagram based on Django’s model. These sound pretty cool if possible.

Conclusion

• The Django Project’s tutorial is one of the best getting-started tutorials I’ve used, props to them.  They must have tested it well, on various audiences. Only thing is some parts seem like suggestions, but it turns out later steps refer to code given so I had to go back. But if you did everything shown, you wouldn’t have this problem.
• Programmatic testing is built right into Django, I’m surprised that you can even test Views. Not necessarily the HTML output, but at least whether or not a view gives you a particular HTTP response code – they give the example of permissions or hidding polls without questions.

I’ll finish the testing tutorial and static files tutorial later, but so far Django seems a pretty capable MVC framework and I’ll probably use it for at least some of the app ideas I have.

I’m writing this partially for myself so I have a reference for what’s wrong while trying to install Django in a Python virtual environment on OS X. I’m just going to write about errors I encountered I think.

Create the virtualenv

In the directory where I wanted to put the virtual environment type:

virtualenv django-ve

where django-ve will be the virtual environment. It should exist first.

Activate it:

cd django-ve
source bin/activate

Install Django

Following Django’s own guide still use pip to install it:

pip install Django

But when I did this I got an error with the SSL connection to PyPy exactly as in, this Stack Overflow post. The solution was as they describe in the accepted answer though you also have to update pip both inside the new virtual environment and outside. (I first tried updating it, then recreating the virtual environment, but this didn’t help, which kind of makes sense if it fetches a new pip each time.)

Install the database drivers

Since I want to use a full MySQL database I needed to install the Python connectors. I stuck with the Django recommended way. I tried to follow their instructions.

When I tried to install mysqlclient I got this same error. Updating Wheels as per one of the suggestions didn’t help, but running

xcode-select --install

did fix the problem by installing the Apple provided developer command line tools which install a C compiler.

Verify?

I verified that the Python virtualenv could see Django as instructed and it could.

At this point, the setup guide ended so I’m just proceeding along with the tutorial.

Tutorial

I continued through the tutorial pretty well OK up until the part about configuring timezones. Silly me, I wrongly assumed I could modify it from ‘UTC’ to ‘AEST’, but even as is linked in their own guide, it’s based on the TZ Database so I should use ‘Australia/Queensland’

Then proceeding along and running

python manage.py migrate

runs successfully and going back to MySQL Workbench I can see all the tables that Django created. Looking good so far.

By this stage I’ve set it up and worked connect it to a real database, so that’s enough for now. I may come back later and critically evaluate Django for my purposes.