Django 2.0

January 18, 2009    Django, Misc

So apparently some folks doing business as “Vyper Logix Corp” are peddling a thing they call “Django 2.0”. I’m not going to link it here since they don’t deserve the Google bump, but if you’re interested you can follow the link in Jannis’ tweet where he mentioned it. In fact, with any luck my Google juice will pop this article up above them.

“Django 2.0” is, apparently, built on the Django 0.96.2 codebase, which is rather interesting since that means it could be missing:

• At least one criticial security fix (that’s why we had a Django 0.96.3).
• The refactored Django ORM, including much more flexible query backends and support for model inheritance (queryset-refactor happened after 0.96).
• Full Unicode support (the Unicode branch happened after 0.96).
• Auto-escaping templates, so open wide for cross-site scripting attacks (auto-escaping landed after 0.96).
• The full django.forms library, including formsets and easy model-generated forms and support for generic relations (all landed after 0.96).
• Swappable uploading and file-storage handlers (landed after 0.96).
• The easier-to-use, easier-to-customize, much-more-flexible admin (newforms-admin landed after 0.96).
• django.contrib.gis for GIS support (landed after 0.96).
• The refactored contrib.comments (landed after 0.96).
• The refactored (and immensely faster) signal dispatcher (landed after 0.96).
• The ability to run Django on the Java virtual machine (Jython compatibility didn’t happen until 1.0).
• An order-of-magnitude faster test framework (landed last week for Django 1.1).
• Aggregation support in the ORM (landed last week for Django 1.1).
• A couple thousand bugfixes which have gone into Django since 0.96.
• Somewhere around 40,000 lines of added/improved documentation.

If you’re happy living without all of those things, of course, it may be that “Django 2.0” is for you. And it’s advertised as a “Premier Python Product”, which of course must mean it’s just great (one wonders why it’s not a “Premier Enterprise Product” since then it’d be “Enterprise”, of course, and they could rip off “PEP” to go with the long list of other Python terms/names they’ve appropriated).

But it’s hard to tell exactly what “Django 2.0” does and how well it does it, since as far as I can see there’s no place to actually look at the code or try it out. Meanwhile, if you’d like the real Django, the one that’s free of charge, free to use, freely licensed and developed in the open, the one that has all the features and improvements listed above (and more), the one that’s used by Fortune 500 companies, the one that has an impeccable dev team, a strong community and a huge ecosystem of ready-made applications, well, you can get it over here, just like always.

In fairness, though, I should point out that I am eagerly awaiting non-Django products from Vyper Logix Corp.