Mark Ramm spent his talk urging the Django community to reduce the coupling between the various parts of Django. He fears that Django might be (partly) going down the same path that historically hurt Zope 2. Zope 2 was a self contained web framework that had no external dependencies. On the surface this sounds like a good thing, it makes installing, deploying, testing etc very easy. *But* Zope 2 created an environment where there where two communities: Python developers and Zope developers, and this surely contributed to its decline. It would be sad if the same thing happened to Django -- and it is not hard to imagine how that could happen. Note that Zope 3 has made amazing strides in decoupling itself which (as Mark pointed out) may make Django the largest open source monolithic web framework in Python.

Next up was a panel of Django committers. Among other things they talked about Mark's concerns. There is a tension between being a "Don't make me think" and "Let me choose" framework. The important thing to note is that the Django developers do care about being a composable framework with a certain set of defaults, and very much want to have good interoperability with the greater Python web development community. For more hope see Django Ticket #8929 titled "Reduce the divide between Django and the rest of the Python web world".

The lightening talks, as always, where fun to watch. There is something compelling about a series of 5 minute talks that anyone can sign up to do at the last minute.

Jim Baker and Leo Soto spoke about Django on Jython. They worked with some Pinax folks to get some of their extensions to Django running on Jython. Pinax on Jython demoed very nicely.

Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan Moss finished off the conference with a talk on the future of Django. In particular I respect their call for the community to "tell them when they suck". The ability to listen to criticism, and to even welcome it is a huge asset. They also want to start getting releases out on a regular schedule. Good stuff.

The first day of the inaugural Djangocon took place at the Googleplex today. Since I wasn't madly writing a presentation at this one (as I have been for every conference I've been at in recent memory), I actually took some notes.

Some highlights:

Leslie Hawthorn (of Google Summer of Code fame if you don't recognize the name) is here at Djangocon and was apparently a big part of making it happen. As always she was cranked up to 11. It's hard to believe just how much stuff has her involvment. Perhaps there is more than one LH?

Guido van Rossum talked about Google App Engine. I am *really* going to need to take it for a spin in my copious spare time. He hinted that more languages beyond Python are being audited for use in App Engine, but there was no promise of a time frame (apparently even the audit of Python -- probably one of the best known languages at Google -- took forever). He didn't say which one. I will place my bets at 60% on Ruby and 40% on Java -- though I wonder what MVC framework would make sense from Java...

Adrian Holovaty reminisced about some of the bad times with early Django code, but also how much of the original concepts remain almost unchanged. He then went on to describe the current state of Django. My favorite bit was this quote from the tracker around August 2005:

I can't think of any other backwards-incompatible changes that we're planning before 1.0 (knock on wood). If this isn't the last one, though, it's at least the last major one.

Jacob Kaplan Moss continued on Django history and the current cool features of modern Django, also with some pretty funny anecdotes. He also plugged Jython on Django :). Which by the way was very much a two way effort. The Django folks where incredibly supportive of our efforts to get Django working with Jython.

Justin Bronn talked about GeoDjango and gave a fascinating talk that started with the fundamentals of GIS and then went into how to use GeoDjango to map-enable your code. It relies on ctypes, which may not be too hard to get running on Jython. GeoDjango demoes very well so that's one more reason for us to take a look at getting ctypes supported.

Carl Henderson was hilarious in his "Why I hate Django". It was a combination of interesting survey of what makes a site like Flickr scale so well and a sort of loving roast of Django. There's no point in trying to convey it -- I think they recoreded all of these talks if you are a fan of Django I'm certain you would enjoy his talk.

I also released Jython 2.5 in the middle of all of this, met Leo Soto (our Django google summer of code student), and talked over some co-routine issues with Jim Baker. All in all a very good day.