Talk Proposal: What we can learn from Django

[George Palmer]

I'd like to see a talk on what we can learn from Django. I'd like
this to focus on the framework differences (not the languages) and
whilst I don't know anything about Django, I'm sure someone out there
will. I've heard the frameworks are similar in some respects but
there are areas of difference - for example I've heard of some nifty
admin area built into Django out the box (I can't actually verify this
I've just heard about it).

This will NOT be a talk about Rails vs Django. Hopefully it will be a
good opportunity to learn from how others have approached a similar
problem domain and see the techniques they've come up with.

Having never programmed Python or used Django I am not suitable to
give this presentation. Also I don't have a ticket so won't actually
be there to see it! Nevertheless I think it would be very worthwhile
and would look forward to watching it online after the event.

Secondly, and I'm surprised this hasn't been raised already, how about
a bigger venue? Even if not this year, definitely next year. I try
to keep twitter and mail off in the day, and whilst I did actually see
the tweet on this occasion, by the time I got to my diary to see if I
could do both a running commitment and the conference on the same day,
all the tickets were sold. Just a thought for next year.

G
--
George Palmer
Founder
http://www.5ftshelf.com

[James Adam]

On 12 Nov 2009, at 10:43, George Palmer wrote:

> I'd like to see a talk on what we can learn from Django.

<snip>

> Having never programmed Python or used Django I am not suitable to
> give this presentation.

This could be the perfect opportunity for you to explore Django and
give the talk yourself? Or if anyone has dabbled in it already, there
could be a collaboration? Presentations don't need to come from just
one person, after all... didn't someone mention Rango at LRUG last
night?

I think there's definitely something interesting in this. What did
Django get right? Templating? Admin for free? Can they be brought
into the Rails World, or are the philosophical differences
insurmountable?

- James

[James Adam]

On 12 Nov 2009, at 10:43, George Palmer wrote:

> Also I don't have a ticket so won't actually
> be there to see it! Nevertheless I think it would be very worthwhile
> and would look forward to watching it online after the event.

It seems like there's still some confusion about what's going on with
the tickets, whether or not we are sold out and so on. Hopefully I can
clarify.

Ruby Manor still has tickets available - we are not yet sold out. It's
just that you can't buy those tickets yet.

We are holding back a portion of the tickets to ensure that people who
want to participate have the opportunity to do so. Last year we sold
out, but it took a month. When it became apparent that tickets were
selling much more rapidly than we'd expected, we reserved a block of
them to ensure that anyone with a great presentation idea would not be
unable to present it purely because of being in the Wrong Place at the
Wrong Time.

Ruby Manor is defined by the level of participation we ask from the
community. What we're asking is that if you would like to come and
talk about something, but don't have a ticket, to please participate
on the mailing list anyway, and if there is demand for your ideas, we
will use one of these reserved tickets to ensure that you can be in
the room on the day.

Please, please please, if you have an idea for something you'd be
willing to share, but don't have a ticket, start collaborating with
the community now. As we mentioned in the LRUG meeting yesterday, even
if you can't, won't or don't attend on the day, it's still in your
interests to help us steer the program, because as George says above,
we'll be filming everything and making it available online afterwards.

Once we have a clearer sense of which presentations are likely, and
therefore how many of those reserved tickets we can make generally
available, we'll throw the doors open again. With advance warning,
this time. That was my bad, but see below for why.

> Secondly, and I'm surprised this hasn't been raised already, how about
> a bigger venue? Even if not this year, definitely next year. I try
> to keep twitter and mail off in the day, and whilst I did actually see
> the tweet on this occasion, by the time I got to my diary to see if I
> could do both a running commitment and the conference on the same day,
> all the tickets were sold. Just a thought for next year.

Last year, we were fortunate enough to sell all the tickets, but it
took a month to do so.

When we actually confirmed that it would be happening with year on the
mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_thread/thread/db1ac2f33f32ec2c
), we heard nary a peep from anyone, and so we had no idea if we could
actually pull this off again. Ruby Manor is defined and utterly
dependent on community contribution, currently facilitated by the
mailing list (and now twitter and the blog), but all was quiet.

Our feeling was that people were maybe waiting to actually buy the
tickets before they would start getting stuck in building the
schedule. Two months isn't a long time to get all the content for a
conference together (RailsConf open their old-fashioned CFP more than
half a year in advance), and so we opened up the ticket sales to try
and spur things along. Little did we know that tickets would sell
around 150x faster.

One hundred and fifty times faster. It's insane.

Regarding venues and venue sizes, that's always a punt too. With no
real idea of how many people are going to want to come, we have to
guess, and balance that with the risk of personal financial loss
(which we're quite willing to absorb, but not if it's crazy money).
It's impossible to really gauge demand without selling the tickets,
and impossible to sell the tickets without having a confirmed venue.
Catch 22.

We have some ideas about how to avoid this in the future, but for the
moment it seems we are a victim of our own success.

Apologies & cheers,

James

[Joseph Wilk]

From some research a year or two ago I found Hobo
(http://hobocentral.net/) to take some of the ideas of Django and plug
them into Rails. Might be interesting to see how its come along.
Also rack-bug (http://github.com/brynary/rack-bug) was inspired by Django.

I would love to hear about what the Ruby world can learn from a
framework such as seaside (http://www.seaside.st/).

--
Joseph Wilk
http://blog.josephwilk.net
+44 (0)7812 816431


>
> - James
>
> >
>

[Peter Ferne]

On 12 Nov 2009, at 12:39, James Adam wrote:

> Regarding venues and venue sizes, that's always a punt too. With no
> real idea of how many people are going to want to come, we have to
> guess, and balance that with the risk of personal financial loss
> (which we're quite willing to absorb, but not if it's crazy money).
> It's impossible to really gauge demand without selling the tickets,
> and impossible to sell the tickets without having a confirmed venue.
> Catch 22.

I would like to challenge that last assumption and so encourage you to
spread the financial risk much more thinly. I for one would be more
than happy to stump up a tenner for a ticket without having a
confirmed venue. I'd be very surprised if that didn't apply to a large
proportion of the potential attendees.
--
petef

[James Adam]

Bear in mind that without a confirmed venue, there is also no
confirmed date... Would you still be willing?

Actually, let's throw that question open to everyone. I am genuinely
interested, as this may influence how we do this next time.

Thanks,

James

[George Palmer]

If I was going to do this I'd want to do it justice. Given a hectic
work and marathon training schedule I think it would be very unlikely
I would find the time to do more than a quick overview with the
conference so close.

I think it would be much better given by someone who has working
experience of the framework - surely there's someone out there?

G

> This could be the perfect opportunity for you to explore Django and
> give the talk yourself? Or if anyone has dabbled in it already, there
> could be a collaboration? Presentations don't need to come from just
> one person, after all... didn't someone mention Rango at LRUG last
> night?

--

[Murray Steele]

2009/11/13 George Palmer <george...@gmail.com>:

>
> I think it would be much better given by someone who has working
> experience of the framework - surely there's someone out there?

Did anyone catch the name of the Rango guy at LRUG on Wednesday? He
might be well placed to give this.

Murray

[Pavel Kunc]

Jakub Šťastný aka @botanicus

Pavel

2009/11/13 Murray Steele <murray...@gmail.com>:

[Matthew Rudy Jacobs]

I spent a while looking at this ~ a year ago

but I generally felt that there wasn't much to talk about,
Merb had already incorporated a lot of the good stuff.

and since then,
with the widespread adoption of Rack,
and the Rails - Merb merge,

I'm not sure what is left to learn.

But yeah,
talk to Jakub about Rango.

2009/11/13 George Palmer <george...@gmail.com>

[David Salgado]

I'd definitely be happy to stump up a tenner on the basis that you'd
find a conference venue and set a date after you'd gotten an idea of
the numbers.

Of course, I'd expect my tenner back if you selected a date that
didn't work for me ;)

David


2009/11/13 James Adam <ja...@lazyatom.com>:

[Pavel Kunc]

I think we can still learn from other frameworks. But as mentioned
Merb has quite a few concepts incorporated. What we are now seeking
for in new Merb roadmap is to bring some ideas from other
frameworks/languages to be experimental/new again (and differentiated
from Rails). My opinion is that merge to Rails will stop or block the
freedom of Merb to do interesting stuff, so that's the main reason I
believe Merb has definitely many things to deliver.

On the other hand I'm not sure if Django is the right place to learn
now. Where I'd like to look for are other languages. Somebody
mentioned Seaside as one good option. I'd really like to hear
something about the more exotic Frameworks and languages.

Pavel

2009/11/13 Matthew Rudy Jacobs <matthewr...@gmail.com>:

[George Palmer]

Good points +1 for "learning from other frameworks"

2009/11/13 Pavel Kunc <pavel...@gmail.com>:

[Matthew O'Riordan]

I too would be happy to stump up some cash prior to you finding a
venue for next time...

Matt

[Anthony Green]

Seeing as I've already had to do it 3 times for Rails Exchange I'd guess I'm
a yes.

[Tom Lea]

How about members front the money, and filling out a http://doodle.com.

After some time or a cap capacity is reached, organizers decide which night to do based on the numbers and venue availability. Once it's all booked anyone who said they can't make it get refunded.

As long as you make sure you have some slack in the available tickets, people who get a refunded can still rearrange their other less important affairs (which is almost everything else) and re-book.

It ensures organisers are not fronting the money on blind faith, and allows you to book the optimal venue for the confirmed budget.

2009/11/13 Anthony Green <em...@acgreen.co.uk>

[Peter Ferne]

On 13 Nov 2009, at 10:55, James Adam wrote:

> Bear in mind that without a confirmed venue, there is also no
> confirmed date... Would you still be willing?

Yes, definitely.

On 13 Nov 2009, at 12:14, David Salgado wrote:

> Of course, I'd expect my tenner back if you selected a date that
> didn't work for me ;)

And, in all seriousness, if I found I couldn't make it after all I'd
be happy to take a chance on being able to pass my ticket on to
somebody else; I wouldn't be upset if I failed to do that and ended up
contributing a tenner and just watching the recordings afterwards.

On 13 Nov 2009, at 19:52, Tom Lea wrote:

> How about members front the money, and filling out a http://
> doodle.com.
>
> After some time or a cap capacity is reached, organizers decide
> which night to do based on the numbers and venue availability.

Sounds like a good idea.

> Once it's all booked anyone who said they can't make it get refunded.

Except I would say no to automatic refunds.
--
petef

[David Salgado]

Actually, that's a really good point.

I withdraw my comment about refunds ;)

D

2009/11/16 Peter Ferne <peter...@gmail.com>:

[botanicus]

Hi James,

I'm the Rango guy. It's quite long time ago since I've been working
with Django last time, but my view on what's better (not necessary
discovered in Django):

- Mountable applications. I know, we have Merb Slices, Rails Engines
etc, but Django is still so much better in it.
- The admin. It's just great, customizable and it works.
- The explicitness. For example Rails are too implicit, sometimes it's
pretty hard to find how something works etc.
- Template Inheritance. Honestly the layout-view architecture is a
crap. Rango itself has it (see http://wiki.github.com/botanicus/rango/template-inheritance),
but in slightly better way than Django has, which means I can return
not just a string, but whatever value, so I can use in the base
template:

/ Array.new is because it shouldn't return nil, otherwise we got
exception from the javascripts helper
= javascripts "application", *block("javascripts", Array.new)

So by default it will be = javascripts "application", Array.new, but
if I add - block "javascripts" { "mootools-core" }, it would be =
javascripts "application", "mootools-core".

Also this pattern may be really useful:
- extends "base.html" unless request.ajax?
= block "content" do
/ whatever

... so if the request isn't AJAX, you get the whole page as usual, but
if the request is AJAX, then you get just the content defined in the
concrete template without the wrapping stuff defined in the base
template.

Showcase: http://gist.github.com/88171

More links about Rango:

- http://github.com/botanicus/rango
- http://wiki.github.com/botanicus/rango
- https://twitter.com/RangoProject

I'm not sure if I'm the right person to talk about Django, I can add
some notes, but I don't feel I'm so experienced about Django. I'm
thinking I may give a talk about Rango, if someone would be
interested?

Cheers,

Jakub Stastny aka botanicus
https://twitter.com/botanicus

On Nov 12, 12:25 pm, James Adam <ja...@lazyatom.com> wrote:
> On 12 Nov 2009, at 10:43, George Palmer wrote:
>
> > I'd like to see a talk on what we can learn from Django.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Having never programmed Python or used Django I am not suitable to
> > give this presentation.
>
> This could be the perfect opportunity for you to explore Django and  
> give the talk yourself? Or if anyone has dabbled in it already, there  
> could be a collaboration? Presentations don't need to come from just  

> one person, after all... didn't someone mentionRangoat LRUG last  

[James Adam]

On 16 Nov 2009, at 17:52, botanicus wrote:
> I'm not sure if I'm the right person to talk about Django, I can add
> some notes, but I don't feel I'm so experienced about Django. I'm
> thinking I may give a talk about Rango, if someone would be
> interested?

If you can be a bit more detailed about what it is about Rango that you'd like to cover, I think we'll be in a better position to give feedback about this idea...

- James

[botanicus]

Well, I would probably just introduce the framework and its philosophy
(which is very important, I would more say that Rango is more about
philosophy than about set of generators etc). It's mostly about "how
to build your own Rack application in maintainable way". I think it
would be just a smaller talk.

Cheers,

Jakub Stastny aka botanicus
https://twitter.com/botanicus

On Nov 16, 5:58 pm, James Adam <ja...@lazyatom.com> wrote:
> On 16 Nov 2009, at 17:52, botanicus wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure if I'm the right person to talk about Django, I can add
> > some notes, but I don't feel I'm so experienced about Django. I'm

> > thinking I may give a talk aboutRango, if someone would be
> > interested?
>
> If you can be a bit more detailed about what it is aboutRangothat you'd like to cover, I think we'll be in a better position to give feedback about this idea...
>
> - James

[botanicus]

Regarding the time schedule, this would be definitely a shorter talk,
I guess 10-15 minutes.

Cheers,
Jakub Stastny aka botanicus
https://twitter.com/botanicus

On Nov 16, 11:38 pm, botanicus <stas...@101ideas.cz> wrote:
> Well, I would probably just introduce the framework and its philosophy

> (which is very important, I would more say thatRangois more about

> philosophy than about set of generators etc). It's mostly about "how
> to build your own Rack application in maintainable way". I think it
> would be just a smaller talk.
>
> Cheers,
>

> Jakub Stastny aka botanicushttps://twitter.com/botanicus

[alan]

+1 to hear about other frameworks, curious about the seaside approach
and the idea of continuations.

On 17 Nov, 14:43, botanicus <stas...@101ideas.cz> wrote:
> Regarding the time schedule, this would be definitely a shorter talk,
> I guess 10-15 minutes.
>
> Cheers,