Re:Django 1.10 released
by paganel on Monday August 01, 2016 @06:03PM
(#12206415)
> In other words, Django used to be picked because it was the hot new thing
I picked up Django in February 2006, in fact the (very cool) boss I had back then picked it up for me and my other programmer colleague, I think it was version 0.96 (or maybe 0.92 ?, not sure). Anyway, we didn't pick Django because it was "new and cool", my boss had a business to run (which folded two years later for unrelated reasons), but instead because Django seemed like a pretty good candidate back then at doing a decent job. Which it did, admirably well, I think ours might have been one of the first lead-management systems built on top of Django's admin interface (lots of monkey-patching involved, which is still one of my "guilty" soft-spots as a programmer 10 years later).
Anyway, web programming back then was, how to put it, in a very interesting place. In Python's case we had Zope/Plone, which had sort of its separate ecosystem doing weird (but sometimes very interesting things) like an object-oriented database (hello, ZODB!) with a very interesing routing mechanism on top of it, Quixote (https://wiki.python.org/moin/Quixote) and mod_python (on top of which I built my first personal Python web-project). PHP was the hot thing, even though not the newest thing, Java's web offering consisted in Struts and some other thing which had a related name for which you needed to be an "Java architect" in order to put 2 forms and 3 templates together, Rails was just about to be launched, ASP was a joke (at least according to my other programmer colleague, who was also teaching ASP at University) and I won't comment on Perl, of which I know not too many things (and which seemed pretty cool, I have to admit).
Considering all this of course that Django (and Rails) was a huge breath of fresh air. People nowadays take things like JS web frameworks for granted, but until not too long ago the web was a very different place (which sometimes I really miss).
I picked up Django in February 2006, in fact the (very cool) boss I had back then picked it up for me and my other programmer colleague, I think it was version 0.96 (or maybe 0.92 ?, not sure). Anyway, we didn't pick Django because it was "new and cool", my boss had a business to run (which folded two years later for unrelated reasons), but instead because Django seemed like a pretty good candidate back then at doing a decent job. Which it did, admirably well, I think ours might have been one of the first lead-management systems built on top of Django's admin interface (lots of monkey-patching involved, which is still one of my "guilty" soft-spots as a programmer 10 years later).
Anyway, web programming back then was, how to put it, in a very interesting place. In Python's case we had Zope/Plone, which had sort of its separate ecosystem doing weird (but sometimes very interesting things) like an object-oriented database (hello, ZODB!) with a very interesing routing mechanism on top of it, Quixote (https://wiki.python.org/moin/Quixote) and mod_python (on top of which I built my first personal Python web-project). PHP was the hot thing, even though not the newest thing, Java's web offering consisted in Struts and some other thing which had a related name for which you needed to be an "Java architect" in order to put 2 forms and 3 templates together, Rails was just about to be launched, ASP was a joke (at least according to my other programmer colleague, who was also teaching ASP at University) and I won't comment on Perl, of which I know not too many things (and which seemed pretty cool, I have to admit).
Considering all this of course that Django (and Rails) was a huge breath of fresh air. People nowadays take things like JS web frameworks for granted, but until not too long ago the web was a very different place (which sometimes I really miss).