11 ms·

Django Awarded MOSS Grant from Mozilla

302 points by cdnsteve 11y ago

bedros 11y ago
awesome, love django project
hackuser 11y ago
Good for Mozilla, putting their money where their mouth is and setting an example. It would be great if they or someone with sufficient reputation setup a way to make it easy for others to contribute financially to FOSS projects, a central payment clearinghouse. In my for-profit organization, we thought we should contribute to the free / open source projects that we were using and which were helping us make money. We wanted to pay our share. We started by putting together a list, and that's pretty much where it ended. The list was enormous. Try it yourself, and don't forget the components of other products that are FOSS. EDIT: Here's Mozilla's attempt at making such a list, which they label "incomplete": https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Projects_in_use_by_Mozilla https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Projects_in_use_by_Mozilla On one hand, it reflects the incredible contribution of FOSS software. On the other there was no way, in a busy workplace, we were going to spend days tracking down all those FOSS developers, finding ways to send them money, and implementing it.
- andrewgodwin 11y ago
  Yeah, it's a fantastic step and we're very happy they piloted the program. The Django Software Foundation has also hired a part-time fundraiser to try and make the project self-sustaining; we're trying to make the project sustainable as a whole and not just a timesink for those who are lucky enough to have unpaid spare time.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  Maybe something like Humble Bundle where you donate a certain amount and you either pick who you want to get a share of it, or Humble Bundle gives it to everyone involved the best they can. I guess humbloss or something? Then even if your list expands, you just keep adding projects. Of course the service can get a cut for themselves as well. Lots of "GoFundMe" and "KickStarter" services, and even one's based around github and bitcoin, but I wonder where the one's for Open Source groups are? Anyone?
hackuser 11y ago
Here's a full list of Mozilla's first round of MOSS grants: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source...
- sleepymountain 11y ago
  > Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, Such a valuable use of donations!
  - STRiDEX 11y ago
    Not defending the absurdity of removing/changing words for sensitivity, but it is in quite a few documents. https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=slave https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...
    - jonknee 11y ago
      I think the OP was insinuating that a search and replace for the word slave is probably not a $15,000 task.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        That, and maybe also that some of us who donated to Mozilla are disappointed to see money going towards political correctness.
        Apocryphon 11y ago
        They've still got a project named Bro, so maybe they're equal opportunity contrarians.
        deleted 11y ago
samskeller 11y ago
Very exciting news. The Channels project within Django is one of the most anticipated future projects and the Django REST framework has been a essential add-on to Django for a long time now
- Antwan 11y ago
  DRF is one of the best addon for django, I'm glad to hear it's finally gonna be (partially) integrated to the main project.
bjt 11y ago
On one hand, awesome to see Django getting first class Websockets support. On the other hand this feels a bit like "Build the web applications of today, tomorrow!" I think that's an inherent problem with kitchen sink frameworks; new things that come along have be shoehorned into the old way of doing things, except when they can't, and then you have to restructure your foundation. I stopped using Django a couple years ago because the kind of apps I wanted to build were REST APIs, websockets, a little static file serving, and connections to realtime backends like redis pubsubs or RabbitMQ. Django wasn't great at any of those, yet carried a lot of baggage from stuff I didn't need (e.g. form handing, templates). I would recommend Flask and/or its underlying Werkzeug library (my personal preference) over Django.
- andrewgodwin 11y ago
  I agree a little bit, but also part of building out a framework is making choices for people - waiting, looking at the problem space, and picking a solution that most people will be happy with. There are some projects that Django is not the right solution for and something like Flask/Werkzeug is definitely better, for sure, but I'm hopeful that the work being done here will help out the majority of people; it brings a lot more than just WebSocket support to the table, that's just the headline feature most people run with.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- eyepulp 11y ago
  I've felt a similar pull away from django on a number of apps. Just looking through the Channel docs [0] however, many of the reasons I get frustrated with Django (primarily the lack of a solid websocket/SSE story) are being addressed. Frankly, I'm addicted to Django's built in auth & admin UI, and I'm thrilled I won't have to bolt on a kludged solution if I want to get some realtime behavior. My frankenstein chat system of Node & Django can be put out of its misery... someday. [0] http://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/concepts.html http://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/concepts.html
- 11y ago
icn2 11y ago
Could some company support phoenix framework as well? Phoenix's channel feature is already there :)
- aczerepinski 11y ago
  I'm learning Phoenix so I've been on their website a bit lately. I believe Dockyard (the company with an ad on the bottom of Phoenix's site) is supporting the project.
- elliotec 11y ago
  I was wondering why Django was the choice anyway... Am I out of the loop here? What about Rails, or anything else?
  - STRiDEX 11y ago
    Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets. Probably because they use it at mozilla.
  - pramodliv1 11y ago
    MDN is written in Django: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma. The add-ons site also uses Django. http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-sites.html http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-s... They have around 15 django libraries on GitHub as well https://github.com/mozilla?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=django https://github.com/mozilla?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=django
    - elliotec 11y ago
      Got it. Thanks.
- chrismccord 11y ago
  DockYard indeed supports the project. I work there full-time, primarily on Phoenix development (I'm the creator). We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without their support, so I welcome the trend of companies supporting the OSS projects they use.
dudus 11y ago
Don't get me wrong, these are amazing news love the project, but I'm a bit confused on how Mozilla works. Just the other day they were requesting donations, now they are donating money? Why ask for donations if you are expecting to donate the money away instead of using it to improve your products? I donated to mozilla a few weeks ago, but now I wonder if I should have just donated directly to django instead, skip the middleman that is not adding anything.
- wldcordeiro 11y ago
  That's a very narrow way of looking at it. Mozilla is both a producer and consumer of OSS, these donations are them being a good citizen of OSS by helping the projects they utilize in the production, management and marketing of their own projects. You aren't skipping any middleman, especially one that isn't adding anything.
- nickstinemates 11y ago
  Why not donate to both (if you can?) Usually these types of grants come with specific results that are good for both parties.
- bad_user 11y ago
  These money probably come from Mozilla Corporation and not the Mozilla Foundation, so from Firefox's revenue. Firefox is a self sustainable project and isn't developed from donations. And the MOSS program is one way to give back to the projects that Mozilla depends on. How many companies do you know that are giving back to the open-source projects they depend on? I don't know that many, so I think those that do should be praised for it.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Just the other day they were requesting donations, now they are donating money? Nonprofits often fund themselves through donations, and award grants as a means of advancing their mission. > I donated to mozilla a few weeks ago, but now I wonder if I should have just donated directly to django instead, skip the middleman that is not adding anything. If your primary concern was the mission of the Django project, you should have donated to Django directly. If it was the mission of the Mozilla project, then donating to Mozilla makes sense. That the Mozilla project determined that one of the ways in which it should expend resources to achieve its goals was to give grants to other OSS projects for specific, identified tasks does not, in any way, change that the funds are being used to support the mission of the Mozilla project.
mangeletti 11y ago
Congrats to Django, and thanks to Mozilla! This is the best news! Thanks @ Andrew Godwin (since I see him in here) for all the work you've done on Django over the past N years. I've contributed small amounts of money to the fellowship program 3 or 4 times now, but the sum of that program's entire fundraising for 2015 is almost tripled by this single grant, and the purpose of this grant money is so exciting. Channels is awesome; so is Django REST Framework. Adding the best of these things to the core and tightening some of the architecture sounds exciting. It helps to position Django for continued relevance, web services and real-time applications become more popular.
dormanted 11y ago
> Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests Oh good. $15,000 well spent.... sigh.
astaroth360 11y ago
I would love it if django were able to compete for more funding like this! Things tend to move much more quickly when there is decent funding involved :D
reinhardt 11y ago
TIL there's a (big apparently) FOSS project called "Bro". Is this an acronym, humour, sarcasm or what?
- d-m 11y ago
  Bro (https://www.bro.org https://www.bro.org) is a network monitoring and protocol analysis framework that has been in development for roughly 15 years. Its name is a reference to "Big Brother" due to its ability to provide visibility into network traffic. The project also got a MOSS grant for $200K today. (http://blog.bro.org/2015/12/bro-receives-200k-grant-from-mozilla.html http://blog.bro.org/2015/12/bro-receives-200k-grant-from-moz...) An employee from Mozilla gave a talk at BroCon this year describing how they use Bro. The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlTo9y7u88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlTo9y7u88.
mladenkovacevic 11y ago
I know purists and more experienced developers will disagree, but for a clueless beginner like myself with no real-life connections to the developer community, it's awesome how external projects have been integrated into official Django releases as they become widely adopted and production ready. From staticfiles, through migrations (developer of South took this one to Kickstarter too) and now channels and DRF. Python 3 followed a similar path with virtualenv. Does any other framework ecosystem work the same way? I don't follow Rails or other ones as closely as I do Python and Django.
- Daishiman 11y ago
  Whether you're a fan or merely tolerate the Python environment, to me the biggest advantage of Django above literally every other web framework I've worked with, is the fact that the developers are extremely serious about maintenance, compatibility, and documentation, things which matter in large, long-lived projects much more than the newest bell and whistle. The core team has been willing to rip out and improve central infrastructure but never at the cost of unreasonable backward incompatibilities, and all changes are documented. Upgrading is never easy on large projects but it's been the easiest in Django. And the third-party packages pretty much fill every niche in a very modular way. I see other devs complaining about their current frameworks' lack of documentation or testing and I feel like I'm in a parallel universe. I can never go back trivially to year-old JS code (and Rails isn't that much better) without some level of breakage or a new way of doing things. Of course other technologies share a similar position on the matter, but they generally don't move as fast as Django does.
  - shuzchen 11y ago
    The one thing that constantly impresses me in Django is how the devs handle changes. As much as possible they follow a deprecation schedule, provide opt-in support for future changes ("load url from future" for the url template tag change was introduced in Django 1.3 for a breaking change set to be default in 1.5), and document these changes. For the most part they've not had to make huge changes because they've made good decisions at the beginning and resisted doing silly things in the core. Contrast with Rails and their scriptaculous past, which was dumped for coffeescript, which I'm pretty sure will be dumped soon (coffeescript is fading from the js mindset now for react/jsx/angular/typescript).
austinjp 11y ago
Congratulations to the Django team. In practical terms, what does this mean for those of us who use Django and Django REST Framework? Will there be a graceful transition path to the planned all-in-one model? What timescales are likely? Also curious about which version(s) of Python are likely to see continued support. I appreciate that some of these questions probably can't easily be answered yet, but a steer would be appreciated. Edit: typo.
- andrewgodwin 11y ago
  We're not bringing in the whole of Django REST Framework, just some of the underlying mechanics that are useful for all apps (like content negotiation). DRF will remain a third-party project. As for Python versions, there isn't any plan to drop 2.7 yet and Channels will work on it. It might be we move to Python 3 only at some point in the future, but there are no firm plans right now.
  - SEJeff 11y ago
    Is Tom Christie (DRF author) going to help with any of that? I backed his kickstarter when he was writing DRF 3.x and I'm just curious if he is involved. Super nice gent.
    - andrewgodwin 11y ago
      He is indeed - he helped me with the Django proposal, actually. He's the one setting the direction for what to include and what to keep separate.
  - jaxondu 11y ago
    According to roadmap https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/ https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/ "Django 1.11 is likely to be the last version to support Python 2.7". Django 1.11 is planned to be released April 2017.
dethos 11y ago
Awesome news, I'm even more excited after reading about how they decided to spend the money. I haven't yet digged into it, but "channels" look promising. I would also like to congratulate Mozilla for this program, several other great projects are being funded.
y_u_no_rust 11y ago
pay someone to help make firefox stop running like ass, it's turning into the Yahoo of web browsers.
travelton 11y ago
This is great news! My Django installation feels pretty bloated with various 3rd party libraries to handle post-request tasks and serving data via web sockets. Can't wait to shed those dependencies. Congrats Django team!
latenightcoding 11y ago
As a perl programmer I wish someone would fund mojolicious
asr1 11y ago
Wow, channels...I will just go and learn go. But for other reasons too. I dont like django anymore, because I kept continuously fighting with the framework. Its fast to work with, if you do exactly what the developers had in mind, but it gets in your way all the time, if you use your own brain.
- pcx 11y ago
  Care to give some actionable feedback rather than just ranting and FUD? I've worked with Go but I would still prefer using Django to start off a new project. The rich set of libraries it provides is only rivaled by Rails among web frameworks. I've never felt I was fighting the framework and it actually taught me several good practices. This grant shows how Django is embracing the new web and moving forward. I am happy I will be able to continue to use Django for use cases it does not cover now.
  - asr1 11y ago
    What is "the new web"?
asr1 11y ago
Wow, channels...I will just go and learn go. But for other reasons too. I dont like django anymore, because I kept continuously fighting with the framework. Its fast to work with, if you do exactly what the developers had in mind, but it gets in your way all the time, if you use your own brain.
victorhooi 11y ago
Curious if anybody here has experience with Django versus Flask versus <other> on AppEngine? I'm new to AppEngine and I'm familiar with Django, so that would have been my first choice - but it seems like Flask, Werzkeug, Webapp2 are more popular - just curious why, or how good/bad Django is on it.
- davidwtbuxton 11y ago
  Django works well on App Engine. If you are using CloudSQL you can use vanilla models, but if you are using the datastore then you can either choose not to use Django models at all (use ndb/db instead) or use django-nonrel or djangae which provide a db back-end. https://github.com/django-nonrel/djangoappengine https://github.com/django-nonrel/djangoappengine https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae There's compromises in using the datastore - you can't do a lot of things that are dead simple with SQL, but in return you get massive scaleability. And the App Engine SDK itself can be a pain to work with, but there are also amazing features like task queues for background processing and Google Cloud Storage integration. Other than Django I've used Bottle for very small App Engine projects. Works great, it's faster than Django, I'd still prefer Django for a typical complex web app where you need all the features. Disclaimer: I work for Potato, which sponsors djangae development.
rayalez 11y ago
Oh, this is amazing!! I'm a huge fan of Django, and I'm really happy to see that the project keeps improving. Recently we had news about update to Django CMS, and now this. Really great stuff.
foxhop 11y ago
I use Pyramid: http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/about http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/about

302 points by cdnsteve 11y ago

awesome, love django project

Good for Mozilla, putting their money where their mouth is and setting an example. It would be great if they or someone with sufficient reputation setup a way to make it easy for others to contribute financially to FOSS projects, a central payment clearinghouse. In my for-profit organization, we thought we should contribute to the free / open source projects that we were using and which were helping us make money. We wanted to pay our share. We started by putting together a list, and that's pretty much where it ended. The list was enormous. Try it yourself, and don't forget the components of other products that are FOSS. EDIT: Here's Mozilla's attempt at making such a list, which they label "incomplete": https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Projects_in_use_by_Mozilla https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Projects_in_use_by_Mozilla On one hand, it reflects the incredible contribution of FOSS software. On the other there was no way, in a busy workplace, we were going to spend days tracking down all those FOSS developers, finding ways to send them money, and implementing it.

andrewgodwin 11y ago
Yeah, it's a fantastic step and we're very happy they piloted the program. The Django Software Foundation has also hired a part-time fundraiser to try and make the project self-sustaining; we're trying to make the project sustainable as a whole and not just a timesink for those who are lucky enough to have unpaid spare time.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
Maybe something like Humble Bundle where you donate a certain amount and you either pick who you want to get a share of it, or Humble Bundle gives it to everyone involved the best they can. I guess humbloss or something? Then even if your list expands, you just keep adding projects. Of course the service can get a cut for themselves as well. Lots of "GoFundMe" and "KickStarter" services, and even one's based around github and bitcoin, but I wonder where the one's for Open Source groups are? Anyone?

hackuser 11y ago

Here's a full list of Mozilla's first round of MOSS grants: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source...

sleepymountain 11y ago
> Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, Such a valuable use of donations!
- STRiDEX 11y ago
  Not defending the absurdity of removing/changing words for sensitivity, but it is in quite a few documents. https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=slave https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...
  - jonknee 11y ago
    I think the OP was insinuating that a search and replace for the word slave is probably not a $15,000 task.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      That, and maybe also that some of us who donated to Mozilla are disappointed to see money going towards political correctness.
      - Apocryphon 11y ago
        They've still got a project named Bro, so maybe they're equal opportunity contrarians.
        deleted 11y ago

samskeller 11y ago

Very exciting news. The Channels project within Django is one of the most anticipated future projects and the Django REST framework has been a essential add-on to Django for a long time now

Antwan 11y ago
DRF is one of the best addon for django, I'm glad to hear it's finally gonna be (partially) integrated to the main project.

bjt 11y ago

On one hand, awesome to see Django getting first class Websockets support. On the other hand this feels a bit like "Build the web applications of today, tomorrow!" I think that's an inherent problem with kitchen sink frameworks; new things that come along have be shoehorned into the old way of doing things, except when they can't, and then you have to restructure your foundation. I stopped using Django a couple years ago because the kind of apps I wanted to build were REST APIs, websockets, a little static file serving, and connections to realtime backends like redis pubsubs or RabbitMQ. Django wasn't great at any of those, yet carried a lot of baggage from stuff I didn't need (e.g. form handing, templates). I would recommend Flask and/or its underlying Werkzeug library (my personal preference) over Django.

andrewgodwin 11y ago
I agree a little bit, but also part of building out a framework is making choices for people - waiting, looking at the problem space, and picking a solution that most people will be happy with. There are some projects that Django is not the right solution for and something like Flask/Werkzeug is definitely better, for sure, but I'm hopeful that the work being done here will help out the majority of people; it brings a lot more than just WebSocket support to the table, that's just the headline feature most people run with.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
eyepulp 11y ago
I've felt a similar pull away from django on a number of apps. Just looking through the Channel docs [0] however, many of the reasons I get frustrated with Django (primarily the lack of a solid websocket/SSE story) are being addressed. Frankly, I'm addicted to Django's built in auth & admin UI, and I'm thrilled I won't have to bolt on a kludged solution if I want to get some realtime behavior. My frankenstein chat system of Node & Django can be put out of its misery... someday. [0] http://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/concepts.html http://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/concepts.html
11y ago

icn2 11y ago

Could some company support phoenix framework as well? Phoenix's channel feature is already there :)

aczerepinski 11y ago
I'm learning Phoenix so I've been on their website a bit lately. I believe Dockyard (the company with an ad on the bottom of Phoenix's site) is supporting the project.
elliotec 11y ago
I was wondering why Django was the choice anyway... Am I out of the loop here? What about Rails, or anything else?
- STRiDEX 11y ago
  Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets. Probably because they use it at mozilla.
- pramodliv1 11y ago
  MDN is written in Django: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma. The add-ons site also uses Django. http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-sites.html http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2011/06/06/large-mozilla-s... They have around 15 django libraries on GitHub as well https://github.com/mozilla?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=django https://github.com/mozilla?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=django
  - elliotec 11y ago
    Got it. Thanks.
chrismccord 11y ago
DockYard indeed supports the project. I work there full-time, primarily on Phoenix development (I'm the creator). We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without their support, so I welcome the trend of companies supporting the OSS projects they use.

dudus 11y ago

Don't get me wrong, these are amazing news love the project, but I'm a bit confused on how Mozilla works. Just the other day they were requesting donations, now they are donating money? Why ask for donations if you are expecting to donate the money away instead of using it to improve your products? I donated to mozilla a few weeks ago, but now I wonder if I should have just donated directly to django instead, skip the middleman that is not adding anything.

wldcordeiro 11y ago
That's a very narrow way of looking at it. Mozilla is both a producer and consumer of OSS, these donations are them being a good citizen of OSS by helping the projects they utilize in the production, management and marketing of their own projects. You aren't skipping any middleman, especially one that isn't adding anything.
nickstinemates 11y ago
Why not donate to both (if you can?) Usually these types of grants come with specific results that are good for both parties.
bad_user 11y ago
These money probably come from Mozilla Corporation and not the Mozilla Foundation, so from Firefox's revenue. Firefox is a self sustainable project and isn't developed from donations. And the MOSS program is one way to give back to the projects that Mozilla depends on. How many companies do you know that are giving back to the open-source projects they depend on? I don't know that many, so I think those that do should be praised for it.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Just the other day they were requesting donations, now they are donating money? Nonprofits often fund themselves through donations, and award grants as a means of advancing their mission. > I donated to mozilla a few weeks ago, but now I wonder if I should have just donated directly to django instead, skip the middleman that is not adding anything. If your primary concern was the mission of the Django project, you should have donated to Django directly. If it was the mission of the Mozilla project, then donating to Mozilla makes sense. That the Mozilla project determined that one of the ways in which it should expend resources to achieve its goals was to give grants to other OSS projects for specific, identified tasks does not, in any way, change that the funds are being used to support the mission of the Mozilla project.

mangeletti 11y ago

Congrats to Django, and thanks to Mozilla! This is the best news! Thanks @ Andrew Godwin (since I see him in here) for all the work you've done on Django over the past N years. I've contributed small amounts of money to the fellowship program 3 or 4 times now, but the sum of that program's entire fundraising for 2015 is almost tripled by this single grant, and the purpose of this grant money is so exciting. Channels is awesome; so is Django REST Framework. Adding the best of these things to the core and tightening some of the architecture sounds exciting. It helps to position Django for continued relevance, web services and real-time applications become more popular.

dormanted 11y ago

> Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests Oh good. $15,000 well spent.... sigh.

astaroth360 11y ago

I would love it if django were able to compete for more funding like this! Things tend to move much more quickly when there is decent funding involved :D

reinhardt 11y ago

TIL there's a (big apparently) FOSS project called "Bro". Is this an acronym, humour, sarcasm or what?

d-m 11y ago
Bro (https://www.bro.org https://www.bro.org) is a network monitoring and protocol analysis framework that has been in development for roughly 15 years. Its name is a reference to "Big Brother" due to its ability to provide visibility into network traffic. The project also got a MOSS grant for $200K today. (http://blog.bro.org/2015/12/bro-receives-200k-grant-from-mozilla.html http://blog.bro.org/2015/12/bro-receives-200k-grant-from-moz...) An employee from Mozilla gave a talk at BroCon this year describing how they use Bro. The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlTo9y7u88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlTo9y7u88.

mladenkovacevic 11y ago

I know purists and more experienced developers will disagree, but for a clueless beginner like myself with no real-life connections to the developer community, it's awesome how external projects have been integrated into official Django releases as they become widely adopted and production ready. From staticfiles, through migrations (developer of South took this one to Kickstarter too) and now channels and DRF. Python 3 followed a similar path with virtualenv. Does any other framework ecosystem work the same way? I don't follow Rails or other ones as closely as I do Python and Django.

Daishiman 11y ago
Whether you're a fan or merely tolerate the Python environment, to me the biggest advantage of Django above literally every other web framework I've worked with, is the fact that the developers are extremely serious about maintenance, compatibility, and documentation, things which matter in large, long-lived projects much more than the newest bell and whistle. The core team has been willing to rip out and improve central infrastructure but never at the cost of unreasonable backward incompatibilities, and all changes are documented. Upgrading is never easy on large projects but it's been the easiest in Django. And the third-party packages pretty much fill every niche in a very modular way. I see other devs complaining about their current frameworks' lack of documentation or testing and I feel like I'm in a parallel universe. I can never go back trivially to year-old JS code (and Rails isn't that much better) without some level of breakage or a new way of doing things. Of course other technologies share a similar position on the matter, but they generally don't move as fast as Django does.
- shuzchen 11y ago
  The one thing that constantly impresses me in Django is how the devs handle changes. As much as possible they follow a deprecation schedule, provide opt-in support for future changes ("load url from future" for the url template tag change was introduced in Django 1.3 for a breaking change set to be default in 1.5), and document these changes. For the most part they've not had to make huge changes because they've made good decisions at the beginning and resisted doing silly things in the core. Contrast with Rails and their scriptaculous past, which was dumped for coffeescript, which I'm pretty sure will be dumped soon (coffeescript is fading from the js mindset now for react/jsx/angular/typescript).

austinjp 11y ago

Congratulations to the Django team. In practical terms, what does this mean for those of us who use Django and Django REST Framework? Will there be a graceful transition path to the planned all-in-one model? What timescales are likely? Also curious about which version(s) of Python are likely to see continued support. I appreciate that some of these questions probably can't easily be answered yet, but a steer would be appreciated. Edit: typo.

andrewgodwin 11y ago
We're not bringing in the whole of Django REST Framework, just some of the underlying mechanics that are useful for all apps (like content negotiation). DRF will remain a third-party project. As for Python versions, there isn't any plan to drop 2.7 yet and Channels will work on it. It might be we move to Python 3 only at some point in the future, but there are no firm plans right now.
- SEJeff 11y ago
  Is Tom Christie (DRF author) going to help with any of that? I backed his kickstarter when he was writing DRF 3.x and I'm just curious if he is involved. Super nice gent.
  - andrewgodwin 11y ago
    He is indeed - he helped me with the Django proposal, actually. He's the one setting the direction for what to include and what to keep separate.
- jaxondu 11y ago
  According to roadmap https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/ https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/ "Django 1.11 is likely to be the last version to support Python 2.7". Django 1.11 is planned to be released April 2017.

dethos 11y ago

Awesome news, I'm even more excited after reading about how they decided to spend the money. I haven't yet digged into it, but "channels" look promising. I would also like to congratulate Mozilla for this program, several other great projects are being funded.

y_u_no_rust 11y ago

pay someone to help make firefox stop running like ass, it's turning into the Yahoo of web browsers.

travelton 11y ago

This is great news! My Django installation feels pretty bloated with various 3rd party libraries to handle post-request tasks and serving data via web sockets. Can't wait to shed those dependencies. Congrats Django team!

latenightcoding 11y ago

As a perl programmer I wish someone would fund mojolicious

asr1 11y ago

Wow, channels...I will just go and learn go. But for other reasons too. I dont like django anymore, because I kept continuously fighting with the framework. Its fast to work with, if you do exactly what the developers had in mind, but it gets in your way all the time, if you use your own brain.

pcx 11y ago
Care to give some actionable feedback rather than just ranting and FUD? I've worked with Go but I would still prefer using Django to start off a new project. The rich set of libraries it provides is only rivaled by Rails among web frameworks. I've never felt I was fighting the framework and it actually taught me several good practices. This grant shows how Django is embracing the new web and moving forward. I am happy I will be able to continue to use Django for use cases it does not cover now.
- asr1 11y ago
  What is "the new web"?

asr1 11y ago

victorhooi 11y ago

Curious if anybody here has experience with Django versus Flask versus <other> on AppEngine? I'm new to AppEngine and I'm familiar with Django, so that would have been my first choice - but it seems like Flask, Werzkeug, Webapp2 are more popular - just curious why, or how good/bad Django is on it.

davidwtbuxton 11y ago
Django works well on App Engine. If you are using CloudSQL you can use vanilla models, but if you are using the datastore then you can either choose not to use Django models at all (use ndb/db instead) or use django-nonrel or djangae which provide a db back-end. https://github.com/django-nonrel/djangoappengine https://github.com/django-nonrel/djangoappengine https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae There's compromises in using the datastore - you can't do a lot of things that are dead simple with SQL, but in return you get massive scaleability. And the App Engine SDK itself can be a pain to work with, but there are also amazing features like task queues for background processing and Google Cloud Storage integration. Other than Django I've used Bottle for very small App Engine projects. Works great, it's faster than Django, I'd still prefer Django for a typical complex web app where you need all the features. Disclaimer: I work for Potato, which sponsors djangae development.

rayalez 11y ago

Oh, this is amazing!! I'm a huge fan of Django, and I'm really happy to see that the project keeps improving. Recently we had news about update to Django CMS, and now this. Really great stuff.

foxhop 11y ago

I use Pyramid: http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/about http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/about