DjangoCon US 2011 Sprints

What's the best way to wrap up a fantastic conference? With an even more fantastic sprint! DjangoCon US 2011 was recently held in Portland, Oregon, and on September 9 and 10, DjangoCon attendees crammed into the offices of Urban Airship to sprint on Django. At the peak of the sprint, over 120 people — almost one third of the conference attendees — were at the sprint venue. Even more people joined in online, using IRC to communicate with those at the

sprint venue.

The sprints were an excellent opportunity for the international Django community to gather and make plans for the future. Over the two day sprint, there were breakout sessions discussing a possible new template tag syntax, the requirements for a next-generation admin system, and the needs of a User model. Some people contributed to infrastructure, such as greasing the gears

connecting Django's ticket system to code sharing sites like GitHub. There was a group brainstorming about the possibility of replacing Django's ticket tracker with something better. Others made contributions to documentation, working on draft tutorials, topic guides, and improving the 'out of the box' experience for new Django users. And, of course, there was the usual sprinting fare of bug squashing and feature construction.

Attendees ranged from long-time Django veterans to recent Django converts; from twenty-somethings to seasoned software veterans. People came from all corners of the globe to attend the conference — South America, Australia, South Africa, Europe, Canada and all parts of the United States.

Portland is a great town for food lovers, and as a result, it's easy for "lets pop out for a quick bite" to turn into a 3 hour lunch break, eating up valuable sprinting time. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Google, and Emma, the sprints were a fully catered event -- so Portland's excellent food came to us, and no time and energy was lost in the hunt for sustenance!

The DjangoCon US 2011 sprints were an incredibly successful event; organizers for DjangoCon US 2012 in Washington DC, and DjangoCon Europe 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland have a lot to live up to. Here's hoping next year's events will be just as successful!

By Russell Keith-Magee, Django Software Foundation President; Photos by Frank Wiles

CSS Selector Shell Released

By Lindsey Simon, Google User Experience Team

Most web developers have felt the pain of discovering or remembering ways in which different browsers interpret and/or render their Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Our newly released CSS Selector Shell is a simple Javascript tool for testing how a given browser parses CSS text by inserting a style element into the document and then reading the cssText back programmatically. You can already check out the CSS Selector Shell code base in action on Google AppEngine.

So far this tool has proven quite useful by showing what happens when developers try to make use of CSS selector syntax that may not be supported in a particular browser. Specifically, it can show how and perhaps why a particular CSS hack works in some browsers and how it is ignored in others. It can also demonstrate the potential for harm when using unsupported CSS syntax in some browsers. For instance, when testing a combined selector ".class1.class2" in Internet Explorer 6, it becomes active as ".class2", which may not at all be the goal of the CSS author. Another detail the CSS Selector Shell demonstrates is that shorthand property/values sometimes expand much further than you may have suspected. On the test page itself, there are two visible test elements that you can use to target and experiment. The code itself makes use of the Dojo Tooklit as well as the Django framework.

We hope this tool will be useful to you in diagnosing problems or understanding the differences between browsers when interacting with your Cascading Style Sheets. We always welcome your feedback, so check out the code and let us know what you think in our discussion group.

Highlights from DjangoCon 2008

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google's Open Source Team recently hosted DjangoCon 2008, the first ever international conference for developers and users of this popular web framework. While we're always pleased to host Open Source events at the Googleplex, we were particularly excited to welcome the Django folks once again. We love Django, making use of it extensively in products like Google App Engine, so it was a pleasure and privilege to give back to this community. More than 250 attendees in Mountain View, California, USA enjoyed two days of technical sessions and celebrated the recent release of Django 1.0, and thanks to the efforts of one of our stalwart Site Reliability Engineers, Rodolpho Eckhardt, we were able to welcome more than 50 additional guests via videoconference with Sao Paulo, Brazil. Better still, attendees raised several hundred dollars for the Django Software Foundation through a charity auction, their donations netting them swag like conference tees signed by Keynote speaker Guido van Rossum and notebooks (the legacy interface variety - paper only) signed by the Django Core Developer Team.

Many thanks to Conference Chair Robert Lofthouse for making DjangoCon 2008 a reality in just a few short months, our attendees for joining us and the entire Django community for both their amazing spirit and great code.

Wish you could have made it? We've got you covered; the conference sessions are now available on YouTube for your perusal.

Ed. Note: Due to technical difficulties, Jacob Kaplan-Moss' Saturday Keynote, The State of Django, was not recorded. Fortunately we've heard from Jacob that he'll be back in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year and will be happy to reprise his talk then. We'll post to this blog when that talk happens and the video is make available.

PyPy Progress: Python Fast and Flexible

By Bea During Open End Systems AB

As readers of the PyPy blog already know, PyPy development has recently focused on getting the code base to a more usable state. One of the most important parts of this work was creating an implementation of the ctypes_ module for PyPy, which provides a realistic way to interface with external libraries. The module is now fairly complete (if somewhat slow, but now up to only twice as slow as CPython), and has generated a great deal of community interest. One of the main reasons this work progressed so well was that we received funding from Google's Open Source Programs Office. This is really fantastic for us, and we cannot thank Google and Guido enough for helping PyPy progress more rapidly than we could have with volunteer-only time!

This funding opportunity arose from the PyPy US road trip at the end of last year, which included a visit to Google. You can check out the video of the talk we gave during our visit. We wrapped up our day with discussions about the possibility of Google funding some PyPy work and soon after a we were at work on the proposal for improvements we'd submitted.

One nice side-effect of the funding is indeed that we can use some of the money for funding travels of contributors to our sprint meetings. The next scheduled Google funding proposal also aims at making our Python interpreter more usable and compliant with CPython. This will be done by trying to fully run Django on top of PyPy. With more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008.

Many thanks to the teams at merlinux and Open End for making this development possible, including Carl Friedrich Bolz, Antonio Cuni, Holger Krekel, Maciek Fijalkowski, Samuele Pedroni and yours truly. We always love to hear feedback from the community, and you can get the latest word on our development and let us know your thoughts on the PyPy Status Blog.

CSSJanus: Helping i18n and LTR to RTL

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Have you ever been asked "but what about a Hebrew version?" Lindsey Simon has, so he decided to write a tool that would help with the task.

CSSJanus is CSS parser utility designed to aid the conversion of a website's layout from left-to-right (LTR) to right-to-left (RTL). The script was born out of a need to convert CSS for RTL languages when tables are not being used for layout (since tables will automatically reorder TD's in RTL). CSSJanus will change most of the obvious CSS property names and their values as well as some not-so-obvious ones (cursor, background-position %, etc...). The script is designed to offer flexibility to account for cases when you do not want to change certain rules which exist to account for bidirectional text display bugs, as well as situations where you may or may not want to flip annotations inside of the background url string. CSSJanus itself is not always enough to make a website that works in a LTR language context work in a RTL language all the way, but it is a start. We sat down with Lindsey to talk about the motivation of the tool, the challenges behind it, and a screencast showing it in action:




Check out a running Django-ified webapp version, and for the greatest detail of what gets flipped in CSS Janus, please have a look at the unit tests.

Dojo Dev Days at Google

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

We recently hosted the Dojo Developer Day here at Google. Dojo is one of the leading open-source Ajax/JavaScript toolkits, and it was great getting to see many of the core Dojo contributors and users from around the country. Brad Neuberg, a Dojo contributor and Developer Advocate for Google Gears, had the following writeup:

Dojo Developer Day, also known as DDD, was a great success this year!

On day one we started with a rundown of successes from 2007: massive refactoring of Dojo into a much smaller, faster system; major improvements to accessibility and internationalization in Dijit, the Dojo widget system; and exciting new features around the Dojo Grid, charting libraries, Dojo.Data, and Dojo Offline.

After reviewing 2007 (including finding out about three new Dojo books coming out soon!), we moved on to setting direction for 2008 and Dojo 1.1, the next release. Every team member gave short updates on where their package is at and where they are going. James Burke of AOL showed off his work on allowing multiple versions of Dojo to work on the same page, while Bill Keese of IBM, Torrey Rice of SitePen, and Nikolai Onken gave us the lowdown on Dijit 1.1 and their improvements to the Dijit themes and look. I'm the module maintainer for Dojo Offline, Dojo Storage, and Dojo Flash, so checked in on the status of these and future directions; expect to see Dojo Flash and the Flash Storage Provider working again with the Dojo 1.0 architecture and a new release of Dojo Offline in the near-future (post Dojo 1.1 on both however).

Adam Peller at IBM showed us the new BorderContainer layout model that makes it easier to construct layouts, while Dustin Machi at SitePen revealed the exciting work he is doing on the JSON-RPC system. Neil Roberts of SitePen has ported Django's templating language to JavaScript (!), doing some nifty things around the build system to make it easy to use while efficient in production, while Eugene Lazutkin of SitePen continues to amaze us all with his cross-browser Dojo graphics work and charting APIs. Eugene expressed interest in playing around with Google Gears to create 2D and 3D Gears modules to make this stuff easier and more powerful; jump on the Google Gears developer mailing list to join the discussion and coding.




I could go on and on; there were so many great checkins and exciting developments on just the first day that I can't list them all here; Alex Russell has an in-depth blog post that goes into the nitty-gritty of all the great work everyone did.

The rest of DDD day one and two were dedicated to demos of cool applications folks are building using Dojo, including a new version of AOL Mail^TM based on Dojo, and serious code hacking during the day to fix Dojo bugs. I spent much of the time during the hackathon refactoring Dojo Flash to work again (it regressed when we jumped from Dojo 0.4 to Dojo 0.9). It's always great to get to work face-to-face with all the names I see fly by on the Dojo mailing lists and Subversion checkins. Thanks to everyone for making DDD a success!

First time to Dojo? Want to be a collaborator and Dojo contributor? Check out the free online Dojo Book and our Contributor Guidelines and mailing lists.