

Django-app-engine development halted - kennu
http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/goodbye

======
wkornewald
It looks like our projects will get a new maintainer. So, it's not as bad as
it sounds. It's only us leaving the project. Follow the discussion group for
more updates:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/django-non-
relationa...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/django-non-relational)

Oh and sorry for the disgusting site "design". Our site isn't running on
Django-nonrel, anymore, and I still didn't get to making a nicer design (not
that the previous one was much better ;).

~~~
purephase
Thanks for all of your contributions. Hopefully it will live on in your
absence.

Out of curiosity (and as a user of Django-nonrel), what are you using at your
start-up?

~~~
wkornewald
I've built a custom micro-framework and an async ORM based on a few ideas I
had while working on Django-nonrel. The result is wonderfully small, simple,
and expressive. We're using it at our startup. I'm just trying to bring back
the fun of exploring new programming concepts. In this regard, open-source
really doesn't work for me.

~~~
chrismsnz
Any plans on releasing the code for your framework/orm?

------
simonw
I've never been completely convinced by the idea of hacking the Django ORM to
be able to talk to non-relational data stores - if you can't do joins, you
lose most of the stuff that makes the ORM useful.

I'd much rather see tools like the Django admin evolve interfaces which can be
plugged in to the Django ORM or plugged in to some other backend (PyMongo,
CouchDB, SimpleDB, AppEngine DataStore or whatever). That feels to me like a
more natural point for an abstraction layer than the core ORM itself.

~~~
fduran
I have a Django site with its admin running off mongodb <http://django-
mongodb.org> , everything runs off the box except for these couple changes:
<http://django-mongodb.org/troubleshooting.html> .

And I agree, I don't see for now much use of the django models and ORM for
mongodb, I just use pymongo code in my views.

------
csytan
I used various versions of Django when I first started hacking on Appengine.
Eventually I just gave up and switched to Tornado. Why? Django is a large and
tightly coupled beast of a framework. It's very likely that a given plugin
reaches down to the DB level meaning that it'd have to be manually ported to
Appengine.

Every single project which tried to port Django to GAE relied on either monkey
patching during runtime or forking the codebase. This was an enormous amount
of work as you can imagine, and the benefits grew smaller and smaller as
simpler frameworks became available.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not ragging on Django just because it's large. I'm
sure at one point, Django started out as a simple, and clean framework. I am
starting to see the same changes in Tornado -- the more people who use it, the
more features (and code) are added to keep them satisfied. This goes on until
a certain point where the underlying technology (the DB in django's case)
changes and it's easier to just start again from scratch.

------
chow
I commend Waldemar and Thomas for announcing their decision so that someone
else can take the reigns, rather that letting things die slowly and quietly.

On the other hand, I can't help but think that "development halted" and "no
longer maintained"[1] headlines do the Django community a disservice, as
evidenced by comments here[2] asking if Django is dead.

Django is alive, active, and serving many of us very well, thank you. IMHO the
reason you don't hear much about it compared to the latest hot shit framework
is because it usually "just works", leaving us more time to deal with more
important things, like actual business problems.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274697> [2]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3275484>

------
100k
This is why we stopped using App Engine frameworks at my gig. I'm not sure
why, but they tend to die off rather quickly. App Engine Patch, Kay, and Tipfy
have all become unmaintained.

My theory is that the critical mass for App Engine frameworks just isn't
there. Most people either use the Django that's packaged with the SDK or
straight up webapp (or now, webapp2, which is pretty great). Slicing the
already small userbase into those willing to use a third-party framework is
just too few people to make maintaining it worthwhile.

~~~
rbanffy
OTOH, webapp2 was incorporated into the platform. There are a lot of
interesting things you can do under app engine and, maybe, platforms as
monolithic as Django have a hard time living on Google's platform.

~~~
100k
I don't think webapp2 is a framework, though. It was designed to be compatible
with webapp2, and then add some niceties, so it's a drop-in replacement for
webapp. Even with webapp2_extras, it doesn't contain half of what Django or
Rails does.

And note that the author abandoned Tipfy for it.

~~~
rbanffy
No, it doesn't. It's very hard to build something as complete - and as self-
dependent - as Django on top of something that moves as fast as Google's App
Engine.

The only thing I miss when using Django on EC2 is the automagic zero-admin
scaling Google provides. The only thing I miss from Django when using App
Engine is the admin (which wouldn't work on top of the datastore anyway)

~~~
StavrosK
> The only thing I miss from Django when using App Engine is the admin (which
> wouldn't work on top of the datastore anyway)

It does, though, it works fine with django-nonrel.

------
beggi
Isn't Django on app engine turning more towards Google Cloud SQL? Don't mean
to be offensive to anyone but Django-app-engine and Django-nonrel has always
seemed to be a bit of a stopgap to me for using Django models and admin with
app engine.

~~~
beggi
further explanation: Since the whole ORM is designed ground up for relational
databases, it has always seemed very hackish to me to add the non relational
support. IMO better to use the ORM and Admin for what it was intended and just
add further upon the stack with pymongo, redis-py etc for those that want to
interact with non relational databases.

------
rewiter2011
is django dead? just wanted to give it a try...

~~~
damncabbage
No. This is a project that lets you use Django on Google App Engine, nothing
more.

(It also has a new maintainer, so no issues there either. See:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274745> )

------
maxklein
The one thing you cannot describe Django as is 'fun'. Django has the unique
property of being able to suck the fun out of any project.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
It's too bad that you're being downvoted by people who only know Django and
not Pyramid, Flask, Twisted Web, Nevow, or any other serious Python web
framework.

~~~
ubernostrum
For the record, I didn't vote (and generally don't vote on HN). But maxklein's
comment wasn't really constructive and didn't offer any specific criticism.
I've said before in replies to his comments that I'd love to hear specific
constructive criticism:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778375>

But, sadly, it never actually happens.

