Wayne Koorts’ Blog

Here’s a mockup of the main window for the upcoming Tubecaster 3.  The release will include support for multiple downloads at once, playlist download support and built-in media conversion tools.  Stay tuned!

I’ve used Django for a few small projects in the last year and have absolutely fallen in love with it. While I always insist that I’m not a language or framework zealot I will quite happily and unashamedly push the Python / Django team wherever possible. Here are some of the reasons why.

Pythonic. This is a term that has evolved with Python to basically mean compliance with the Zen of Python. Here is the Zen of Python in its entirety as provided by Python.org:

    Beautiful is better than ugly.
    Explicit is better than implicit.
    Simple is better than complex.
    Complex is better than complicated.
    Flat is better than nested.
    Sparse is better than dense.
    Readability counts.
    Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    Although practicality beats purity.
    Errors should never pass silently.
    Unless explicitly silenced.
    In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
    There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
    Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
    Now is better than never.
    Although never is often better than *right* now.
    If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
    If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
    Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

It just so happens that this aligns perfectly with the way I think. This is what drew me so quickly and intimately to Python itself.  It’s one of those things that makes a language “feel right” to us.  Every time I read the Zen of Python I find myself nodding profusely and grinning cheekily.  Django is Pythonic.

No black magic. Django’s components provide everything you need, but don’t go away and do anything so mystical that you can’t quickly get a handle on what’s going on and what their thought process may be.

Fantastic, complete documentation. The documentation on the Django website is well-written, complete and up to date with abundant code examples.  I really can’t stress the importance of this enough.  Anyone who has spent hours trawling through useless, incoherent, incomplete documentation will immediately see the value in this.

It’s ready when it’s ready. The Django developers are not afraid of holding back on a release if it’s not ready.  Django 1.1 was released about 3 months later than it was intended and the developers had no shame in holding it back because it wasn’t quite ready.  I highly respect them for this because it means that we can fully trust new releases to be very stable with copious amounts of polish.

Stays out of the way. One of the things I respect most about Django is that it doesn’t get in your way.  While it provides a complete stack for everything from data model handling to view templates you are free to substitute components with any of your own.  Don’t like the built-in authentication mechanism?  No problem.  Plug in another one or write your own.  Django’s concept of “applications” (basically pluggable modules) makes this easy.  Want to use your own file storage mechanism instead of what Django provides?  You’re more than welcome.

Built-in caching. Django was designed from the ground up with caching in mind and not only provides its own caching mechanisms but also plugs into existing, tried-and-true caching mechanisms like memcached (used by Facebook).

Easy admin interfaces. Django comes with a fully customisable admin interface for your projects which will hook directly into your data models.  This allows you to concentrate on developing your end user views without having to first get data entry forms in place.  Of course there’s no reason why you can’t continue to use the built-in admin tools or allow portions of them to be used by your end users.

Sane templates. Django’s templating system is just plain sexy.  It’s got the lot: fully-featured tags, batteries-included filters, and very simple, Pythonic, easy-to-learn syntax.

I could go on.  Apart from all that I’ve just mentioned, Django is also backed by Google and has the stamp of approval from Python’s creator himself, Guido von Rossum.

Not convinced?  Just take a look at the vast array of sites being created every day on djangosites.org.

Following on from the wildly successful Stack Overflow programming questions and answers website, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have launched Server Fault, a questions and answers site following the same format but now for “system administrators and IT professionals” (currently in Private Beta, click here for sign-up instructions).

I’ve been using Stack Overflow for about 5 months and I absolutely love it. It has become the definitive, and I dare say de facto standard, questions and answers one-stop-shop for programmers. You can post a question for just about any programming topic and receive an answer within minutes, sometimes even seconds. This removes an old hassle with posting questions on Web 1.0-style forums where you had to wait impractically long lengths of time to receive answers.

These sites don’t just follow any standard Q&A format either.  Just take a look at the diagram on the about page of either site and you’ll see that they’re a deliciously freakish Wiki/Blog/Forum blend.

One of the things I love about boths sites is their innovative karma and badge system, where users are rewarded by the community for making valuable contributions.  This gives users a reputation score which appears next to their name wherever it appears on the site.  This can be used as an assessment of someone’s overall standing in the community.  Badges are awarded for special achievements like providing an especially highly-rated answer or for being recognised as an expert in a particular technology.

Of course possibly the most important feature of boths sites is that you don’t need to be logged in to ask or answer questions.  This removes yet another annoying hurdle for the casual help-seeker.

I encourage everyone in IT, be it programming or otherwise, to sign up to at least one of these – you won’t look back.

-Wayne

The wonderful folks at Balsamiq have graciously donated a license for their Mockups user interface design software to the Tubecaster project to help with future improvements.  I just want to say a huge thank you to Mariah and the Balsamiq team for this, and to encourage everyone to check out this fantastic piece of software.

Tubecaster Balsamiq interface

Yesterday I was looking for a Python source code line counter to give me a summary of some source files, but I couldn’t find a free one that would do the job as I wanted. So I created one. And you can have it for free (GNU GPL) – download it here:

Download Python Line Counter

Sample usage:

cmd> plc.py tubecore.py tubewx.py tubewxdialogs.py

Input files:
tubecore.py
tubewx.py
tubewxdialogs.py

Total lines:   1510
Code lines:    1111
Comment lines: 139
Blank lines:   260

-Wayne