

Sneak Preview of Django Zoom (Heroku-like service for Django apps) - dannyr
http://noderabbit.com/2010/09/18/sneak-preview-djangozoom/

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KingOfB
Looks great, but It's more of an 'EngineYard-like service for Django apps'.
Heroku does this marketing / technical trick where you don't have machines,
just ruby running in the cloud. No servers to reboot or configure, just X$/mo
add-ons to click.

I use and think both services are great, but Engine Yard has all of it's
thunder stolen by Heroku. Steeper learning curve, but far more dynamic than
Heroku.

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SkyMarshal
One thing Heroku (and Engine Yard) had/have going for them is you can't run
Rails on Google App Engine. Any opinions on how Zoom is going to stack up to
Django on GAE?

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ianb
* You _only_ get the GAE database, no RDBMS, not even alternate nosql things like Mongo.

* Doing geo stuff on GAE is pretty infeasible.

* You can't run other commands, e.g., shell out to git. * You can't connect to any services except HTTP (on port 80/443).

* While you can use the database instead of a filesystem most of the time, it's often harder. Even simple things like using a library that does file-based caching adds challenges to code reuse on GAE.

* There are no C-based libraries on GAE, including things like lxml, image processing libraries, etc. GAE slowly adds new GAE-specific libraries for some of those operations, but slowly and inconsistently.

Often an app won't need these things, but maybe at some point in the future it
will -- with GAE you are kind of stuck at that point, or you have to setup
external services to augment your core GAE app (removing a lot of the
operational simplicity of GAE). And because Django Zoom uses individual
virtual servers there's no point at which you can't _somehow_ accomplish what
you want to accomplish, even if it's not something directly baked into the
service.

In practice it's extremely uncommon to develop an application then move to GAE
-- people always develop _for_ GAE from the beginning.

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kilian
Looks...kind of unpolished ;) I understand that getting it to work is the hard
part, but adding a little style can't hurt.

Requested access to the beta, I have a couple of django projects that would be
nice to run on such a service.

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nateaune
@kilian - we fully intend to polish the UI and make it look nicer, but you're
right - we've been focusing on getting the backend working well, as that seems
to be the biggest challenge. It could like all nice and pretty but people
won't use it if it breaks. Looking forward to getting your feedback when you
deploy your Django projects!

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mgrouchy
This is pretty awesome, it really kind of sooths a pain point I have been
dealing with. The company I work at is a Django Shop and every time I type
"fab Prod deploy" I consider starting work on a gui interface to provision
servers(with the linode api), run test suites and deploy code from Github.

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csytan
DjangoZoom (<http://djangozoom.com/>) is mentioned several times in your
article, but none of them are clickable.

General request for business blogs: make it easy to navigate to the site you
are talking about!

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js4all
Great idea with much potential.

Have you solved the problem how to sandbox/protect against apps that have gone
wild?

Are you allowing or planning to clone using git protocol instead of http?

Do you support or have planned custom domains?

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endlessvoid94
already exists: djangy.com ;-)

~~~
zalew
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616704>

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bmelton
I've also requested an invite.

I'm less concerned with the lack of polish (as kilian brought up) -- but I
would definitely start copying and pasting some of the information that you
have on the noderabbit site to the DjangoZoom page, or at least, before you
come anywhere close to live.

I would tell you to look at the Heroku site for what kind of information sells
to users, but I've always had a hard time reading their color scheme, so I
much preferred yours.

Any plans on support for Tornado, or is it JUST Django on the roadmap?

~~~
nateaune
Thanks for your suggestions! What kind of info would you like to see that
would help you understand the service better?

We have no plans to support Tornado, but if there's enough demand we'll
consider adding support for it.

