DjangoCon: The Long Winding Road to Django 1.0
Adrian Holovaty took the stage at DjangoCon shortly after lunch to walk Django users down memory lane, showing the unlikely evolution of a very simplistic tool he and Jacob Kaplan-Moss hacked together in a hurry, to the mature open source framework that is today’s Django.
Suffice to say that Django comes from humble beginnings. Holovaty walked through a series of humorous, self-deprecating slides showing the many mistakes he and the other earlier developers made in Django’s earlier stage.
He also highlighted the many times he assured the community that some feature would be “the last major change before 1.0.” As seasoned Django users know, the 1.0 release was a long time coming and Holovaty freely acknowledged that his early promises often went unfulfilled.
After tracing the evolution of Django to the semi-stable state it reached earlier this year, Jacob Kaplan-Moss offered an overview of the significant changes that have happened in the last several months leading up to the 1.0 release.
Perhaps the most exciting news for Django newcomers is 1.0’s much improved and expanded documentation. Not only have the Django docs been updated to reflect the new features (with some 40,000 new lines of documentation), but there are some new documentation tools like the ability to build the docs locally or even generate very nice PDF versions for offline reading.
As proof of Django’s open source approach and the vibrant community surrounding it, Moss reports that about half of the source code contributions are now coming from the community. The Django author’s page currently lists some 230 authors.
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