Jannis Leidel

UPDATE: Err, wOOOt! My application was today officially accepted by Google and Django’s main developers. Thank you for your support and the confidence you have in me.
–
Hi. This weblog is about my summer of code 2007. Please look at my curriculum vitae to get to know me better.

My formal application for Google’s Summer of Code is as follows:

Django is one of the major web frameworks that emerged within the last years and created a solid user and developer base. It simplifies the development process by providing tools to reduce repetition, abstracting common web paradigms and still being hackable. Until today that attracted a wide section of programmers, from novices to pros.

As the code base is constantly moving towards the 1.0 release, more and more people are using Django to build small projects and websites, just as well as commercial applications like intranet services and content managment systems are realized with it, too. Good for them:

Reinventing the wheel with Django is perfectly easy – every Django beginner wrote a todo list or weblog applicaton :)

But this is not the end of the road for user participation. The community should be able to uncover more web ideas for contrib apps, combine the already written views and templates to more effecient apps and simply share their products with other users.

The implementation of a package system would lower the threshold for Django and Python beginners significantly because it reduces the hassle of the current installation procedure.

My task is to do the groundwork for an application which manages Django application packages and integrates tightly with the Django code.

The following steps should illustrate my considerations:

1. Infrastructure (6 weeks)

   Define hooks in the Django code to standardized python modules (e.g. setuptools, distutils, py2exe, py2app etc.) because they solve a lot of software management problems such as dependency tracking and version management. Then implement generic packaging functionality for use via django-admin.py/manage.py: CRUD, upload, download, install package.

   Example of a first-time installation of a Django app:

   tichy:~# django-admin.py package search Satchmo
Found 1 package on djangoapps.com:
1. satchmo - The webshop for perfectionists with deadlines.
tichy:~# django-admin.py package install satchmo
Installation directory for satchmo? [/home/jannis/django/satchmo/]
Installing satchmo (/home/jannis/django/satchmo/)……..Done.
Syncing sqlite database with initial data…Done.
Running tests…. 0 errors found.
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.


2. Website (4 weeks)

   Build a community website with a searchable application repository (e.g. title, description, rating, user) and provide several download options (egg, tar.gz, zip, exe, app, deb, rpm etc.). Then build interface to commandline package management as defined by setuptools and distutils.

3. Documentation (2 weeks)

   Add documentation about using the package function of manage.py, the community website (e.g. djangoapps.com) and write a tutorial about making Django applications packable (e.g. by including package information in a package.py file in the root directory of a Django project or app).

4. Bonus

   Include support for version control systems like subversion or bazaar (bzr) to encourage active development on the community website. Nightly builds and application documentation are some of the possible features.