Today I read a very good post from Armin Ronacher about Jinja and Django. You can read more here.
To summarize a bit, Jinja is a great template engine that resemble closely to the built-in Django template engine, but as Armin shows work very differently.

In the past I have been looking at Mako as an alternative for the template engine of Django. What seduced me was the performance of Mako. However Jinja 2 is known to be as fast and looks more appealing, even more if you are used to the Django template engine. Converting to Jinja is probably less painful than with Mako. Again you can read more about moving to Jinja on Armin blog post. He gives a great deal of helpful informations.

What I also like about Jinja is that this framework is brought to us by the same people that created several very good tools and libraries (Werkzeug,Pygments…). Check their website here. As a Wordpress user I’m following their new project Zine. It looks like a Wordpress built in Python (the inspiration is obvious). It is still very basic right now, but the base they are building upon looks promising.
By the way another thing I like about these guyes is they use Mercurial and Trac: both great tools.

Until next time,

Code with pleasure.

Richard Lopes

I missed that !
5 days ago, Python 3.0 aka Python 3000 was announced on Python.org.

This is a new start for Python as they made breaking changes and the 2.x branch is not fully compatible. For developers it means they have to learn a somewhat different breed of Python. For existing projects and the thousands of libraries in the wild, the question will be when and will it make sense to port to Python 3.0 ?

A new project starting now have to decide if they go the 2.x or 3.0 way. I bet they will continue the 2.x for a while since third party work is 2.x compatible right now.
However I believe this is a major step for Python and I would love to see a major project like Django move to 3.0. As I understood, Python 2.7 could be helpful to migrate 2.x code to 3.0 since it can warn you about the code that will break on 3.0.

Maybe this will start a new trend of developers taking ownership of all the most useful and best known libraries and porting them to 3.0 (anyone ?). As soon as the most important code is available in a 3.0 flavour, this should move projects using this underlying code to 3.0 too.

We will see,

Richard Lopes

Hello again,

For those Python/Django folks, here is the place to find about me:

http://djangopeople.net/griffon/

See you,

Richard Lopes