Django continues to gather momentum towards its imminent 1.0 release. The 1.0 beta 1 is out; the developer documentation has been refactored; it already places nicely with Python's powerful debugging and logging tools; indeed, all is proceeding according to the roadmap, more or less. James Turnbull will be speaking about Django 1.0 at the eighth Oxford Geek Night this Wednesday, and it looks like he's got plenty of triumphs to bulletpoint for us.
An Oxford Django sprint had been mooted for this weekend. I didn't hear much more about it, but to be honest I had the great opportunity to actually have my own sprint---against 1.0b1---in work this week, working on a fast-turnaround project. I definitely felt performance improvements, especially when running unit tests. It was also lovely to work on my first internationalized/localized site and to find that it was just a question of dropping in certain bits of middleware to make it work across six languages. We didn't have any translations in place, but I clicked on "Polszczyzna" expecting bugger-all to happen and then suddenly realised that the English-language link read "Anglieski." It's characteristic of Python's (and Django's) refreshingly plastic and just-works behaviour. Magic.
We did encounter one bug, involving model inheritance. I struggled for a while with registering with the project trac to report it. It's my first mediocre experience with Django: I waited a day or so for the arrival of an account-confirmation email, but eventually gave up without adding what would have admittedly been a me-too to an existing bug report. But then, email finally in my inbox, I chased it up just now, to find that it's been fixed. Today.
Probably much like Django itself, the project's interface with the user/consumer requires some past experience with its foibles, but the actual endeavour itself is fast, well-factored and puts most closed-source equivalents to shame.
