Java, PHP and others are common at the universities curriculum.
Django and co. aren’t.
Why? Good question.
But it is the main reason why tschitschereengreen visited the HTW Dresden last Friday: To give the students some information about Django on Python. For those, who weren’t with us this afternoon, there’s a short summary:

» Jirka told us some experiences out of the practice: how tschitschereengreen organises its project management; why we prefer frameworks like Django…
» he talked about agile software – the advantages and disadvantages in general and also concerning the single development frameworks: Django vs Rails vs Symfony
» we discussed about why PHP and Java are so popular comparing to Django- although rapid development is fast, simple and stable. one statement: there’s no big industry behind Django and Python which is interested in to spread it…
» Jirka showed us the Django- coding: how it works, where the advantages hides and why it is comfortable to handle.

All in all it was a good atmosphere, and I felt that the students are interested in. And the way how Jirka spoke about these things, was bracing enough not to be bored (: – it was Friday afternoon – normally it is not the students most preferred time to be at uni… is it?
And I especially recognized one thing: when Jirka reported about the testing method we practice at tschitschereengreen:
everybody was prick-eared and the pens were crawling over the paper (: Why? Because Jirka reported, that we kicked out the unit testing in the company! why? Because it eats time… a lot of time.. and even the best unit testing doesn’t give you a guarantee that the application will work faultless. and: how we work instead? If the base for an application is set, we start testing the app manual. And if there are bugs, we fix them. So we are much faster…

After the workshop I asked the students what they think now about django and python. The feedback was positive: Sven for example finds Python and Django very interesting.. especially because there are that fast. And he would wish that it gets more importance at the universities. [That is what we require too, because then it becomes easier for us to find competent programmers for tschitschereengreen... (; ] Dominik already worked with Java. He finds it too complicated sometimes and would prefer to programm with Django. The other students also expressed a good opinion about Django… Jakob wasn’t that interested in Django, but in Python. He is convinced that companies like google wouldn’t use it if there wouldn’t be advantages. There were only two voices who said, that they prefer to work with established languages – and that they wouldn’ t like to use the console.

So, the basic statement we learned about Django is: Agile software makes a lot of things much easier. If you recognize, that something doesn’t work like you wanted, or if the client’s wishes changing suddenly.. you can go back, without altering the whole app. So you’re more flexible. The apps are stable and the codes are very short and therefore kind of “clean”. And to conclude: “Rails performes much better than Symfony. And Django performes much better than Rails” (Framework+Performance).
At last here we go with a video from Friday.. and guys! I will train myself concerning the video making competence!!! PROMISED! (:

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.