Thanks to Django

We’re going to take a break from banging on the cloud storage drum and offer an appreciative hat-tip to Django. Not the legendary Gypsy guitar player – although he was pretty good – but the Python-based web framework.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Django, it was started in 2003, as the brainchild of web developers Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison. You can read more by scrolling down here, but the basic story is that the pair were working for LJWorld, which publishes a number of newspapers and sites. They were constantly being pressed to develop new applications in absurdly short timeframes and there weren’t any other frameworks out there that let them meet these deadlines. So, using Python, they developed Django.

Python, as a language and a community, has quite the large web framework ecosystem – new ones seem to pop up weekly. As a result, there’s a bit of everything out there to choose from. What Python had historically lacked though, is an answer to Ruby On Rails, a rather opinionated framework focused on rapid application development. Django changed that. Today Django is the framework of choice for The Onion, the Washington Post, Everyblock, Discovery.com, and many, many other sites and organizations.

When we needed to pick a web framework to develop our corporate site, the GUI for our flagship appliance, the Nasuni Filer, and a handful of internal applications, one of us suggested Django. Thanks in part to its high-pressure newsroom origins, it allows you to get things up and running quickly and accurately. Django also has a massive community, so we knew that if we needed help, we’d be able to find it easily.

It proved to be the right choice, in part because teaching people how to use it is simple and fast. A few of us came to Nasuni as pure storage guys, without extensive web development experience, and we have since written a staggering amount of Django code. If you have Python skills, it’s easy to become proficient and highly effective quickly. We echo the oft-repeated point that Django’s best feature is the fact that it is Python under the covers. 

We’re very happy with what Django has enabled us to do so far, and how quickly we’ve been able to do it, but Django will also prove to be a great framework as we evolve. Django’s strengths, its features, and its constant improvements are a boon to us. Fundamentally, Django (and Python!) make us a far more nimble organization.