written on Wednesday, December 12, 2007
I stumbled about this thread on django-developers which proposes calling the Django 1.0 release Django 2.0. One the one hand version numbers say nothing. Just take Wine or Trac as two examples that are already very stable but still below the magical 1.0 release. Open Source software often takes some time until a 1.0 is released and that's perfectly fine. However skipping a version number is purely a marketing trick IMO. Just think of Java which currently names 1.6 Java 6 whereas 1.4 still was Java 2.
With django it looks like the plan is to keep up with Rails which went to 2.0 a few days ago. While I love to see that django kicks ass and it's moving toward a stable release I have a bad feeling naming it 2.0. Because there is currently a huge gap between rails and django unfortunately. Rails has gained really good integrated migrations, REST webservices, a debugger and many other things django is still lacking.
Django makes an incredible good framework if you get your problem into the use case of django. But as soon as you break out of it and need something that goes beyond what's possible in django you wish you have chosen something else. The django ORM is far from optimal, the admin rocks but as soon as the number of users exceeds 10.000 users it's impossible to use it (chose yourself in a dropdown of 50.000 users …) or becomes utterly complex. Complex data models also look awkward in the admin or become too complicated to manage. And if you want to stick with the admin you cannot replace the user model. Now what do you do if you have a forum and want to count the posts? Use a UserProfile module? And how do you want to display a list of users sorted by their number of posts?
Yes there are ways to hack around it but the more complex the application becomes the more you of django's strengths become obsolete. The application I'm working on right now now is only using two more contrib modules. The auth and the admin, and it looks like we have to drop them too, due to the limitations. All applications in that project hack around ORM limitations, we have an incredible number of recreated base middlewares, we have to monkey patch the request object to hack in subdomain support.
I was talking with David Cramer from curse gaming about some of the issues and he told me that they have forked django at a given point and patched the ORM. The django template engine was replaced by Jinja (our application does the same) and they are caching the hell out of the application to scale it. Bryan McLemore from the curse team told me some time ago that some pages have up to 30 queries on a page.
I don't want to say that django fails in what it's doing. But it's far from 2.0.