

Django 1.4 Beta 1 Release - googletron
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2012/feb/15/14-beta-1/

======
peterfschaadt
Nice to see some added security features, including more secure password
hashing.

Here is a direct link to the changes:
[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4-beta-1/#w...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4-beta-1/#what-
s-new-in-django-1-4)

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zacharytamas
Nice to see Django moving forward! I've been developing with Django since 2006
and have been frustrated at seeing the steam and community seem to stagnate in
comparison to the Rails community. Granted, I've heard the opinions that the
Django community is less vocal because they're busy actually building things--
which I could agree--but as a fresh developer I could see how the Rails
community would seem more inviting. I've played around with a couple good
ideas in my head for promoting the Django userbase but haven't gotten around
to it.

~~~
wvanwazer
I'm hoping this will fix some of that: <http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-
to-django/>

~~~
zacharytamas
Me too! Adrian and Jacob have both spread their wings beyond Django and now
that EveryBlock is doing well it's nice that Adrian can turn some of his
attention back to the community. Some clear official direction can go a long
way.

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ridruejo
For those of you wanting to quickly check it out without interfering with your
existing setup, we are working on an installer and VM image for Django 1.4 and
will post it shortly on <http://bitnami.org/stack/djangostack>

~~~
tga
Or you can use a virtualenv, like you already do for all your python
projects.. right?

~~~
ridruejo
These are self-contained packages, include their own pre-configured copies of
Apache, MySQL, etc. As far as I understand virtualenv only applies to Python +
related packages, not other dependencies. But I agree that for many setups,
virtualenv would work fine as well.

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teebot
Why no python3 version? Django depending on other components which have not
been ported to python3 yet and python3 being backward incompatible it takes
time to port them all of course. But as python beginner, I want to start by
learning python3 which was released on December 3rd, 2008

~~~
asto
Learn on python 2.x. You don't want to start with a version that has fewer
compatible packages.

~~~
kibwen
I mostly concur with this sentiment. I jumped straight into Python 3, and the
amount of incompatibility was almost frustrating enough to make me drop the
language entirely.

However, if you're stubborn enough to power through (and not afraid to roll up
your sleeves and manually correct any errors you encounter (which is actually
quite a good way to learn the nuances of a new language)) your reward is a
language that is more forward-thinking and consistent. Sometimes it's worth
the frustration (but only sometimes :) ).

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Yaggo
> Armin has repeatedly talked about how much slower Django's template
> rendering is than Jinja's, and I want to cut out our inefficiencies to
> bridge the gap.

Why not simply switch to N^HJinja2? (Okay, probably not that simple, but
still.)

~~~
reuser
The specific reason not to switch to Jinja2 was that Django's templating
language was originally intended not to be that powerful, so that you could
feel reasonably safe handing it to non-technical "designers" or "writers"
rather than fearing that they would generate a great variety of new tracebacks
for you to look at.

If you have to ask why Django would not switch to (or even make any effort to
allow the use of) any externally developed tool in place of its own, you might
not have noticed that almost everything in Django is self-developed and that
the officially given reason is that they are "perfectionists. with deadlines."

The reason why not is the Django project's philosophy

~~~
rlander
_The specific reason not to switch to Jinja2 was that Django's templating
language was originally intended not to be that powerful, so that you could
feel reasonably safe handing it to non-technical "designers" or "writers"_

Jinja2 follows this same philosophy of a sandboxed engine and the syntax
matches django's almost exactly (it was actually based on django templates).
The designer wouldn't even notice he is dealing with a different templating
language.

So, it looks the same from a designer perspective, is at least an order of
magnitude faster and is much simpler to extend. So, why _not_ switch?

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mikezupan
the args/kwargs in templates is what I've been waiting for

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4-beta-1/#a...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4-beta-1/#args-
and-kwargs-support-for-template-tag-helper-functions)

~~~
slig
If you can't wait till 1.4, you can do that right now with classy-tags[1].

[1] <https://github.com/ojii/django-classy-tags>

------
richardlblair
I hope bug #1744 is fixed... Not having a functional group by in the ORM is
literally killing me.

~~~
jdunck
And by "literally", you mean "hyperbolically".

~~~
dominicrodger
Anyone else's imaginations going wild thinking what bizarre combination of
circumstances might lead to the lack of a "group by" in an ORM leading to a
gradual death, during which one still has sufficient strength to post to HN?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'll give this a shot.

No group by means that a Mr. Blair's project fails, and he gets fired, and
loses his health insurance. Combined with his pre-existing medical conditions,
he cannot get another job nor afford treatment, and dies a slow death of, say,
bonitis.

Literally dead, for lack of a "group by" in an ORM.

