[Django]-Django: Moving from XAMPP to Django questions

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  1. Security. The Django core team are very security-conscious, and have taken great care to make things like SQL injection impossible. The next version, 1.2, includes a whole new cross-site request forgery protection library. Obviously, you still need to be aware of these when developing your application, but Django does a lot to help you.

  2. What goes under /www/public: Nothing. Django doesn’t work via the normal Apache serving mechanism: it hooks into (preferably) mod_wsgi, which needs a single file which then tells it to run the rest of the code. The templates can go anywhere, and are pointed to by your Django settings file, but again aren’t served directly by Apache.

  3. .htaccess: You don’t really need it, because of point 2: you’re not serving things in a filesystem hierarchy. The best way to do it is to set up vhosts and manage things that way.

  4. Cron jobs: Absolutely. Django is just Python, and you can easily run Python scripts via cron. Django allows you to set up custom command scripts which initialise the ORM and give you access to anything you would need.

  5. Libraries: Again, because Django is Python, you get access to the huge amount of Python libraries that are out there. For curl, Python has urllib; for ImageMagick, it has PIL; and no doubt there are equivalents of ffmpeg too.

  6. Admin: Again, security has been thought of from the beginning. Opinions differ as to whether you should use the admin only for your expert users, or customise it and allow access for all users; I’ve had a lot of success using it as the basis for my custom CMS interfaces.

  7. Facebook, etc: Yes, there are libraries for all of these.

  8. E-commerce: There is a whole e-commerce project, Satchmo, written in Django. Libraries exist to interface with all the payment providers.

  9. Is it worth it? Only you can tell. My experience working alongside a range of developers who have moved from PHP is that they’ve enjoyed the experience and became much more productive.

👤Daniel Roseman

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On SQL Injections: Django uses an ORM, which takes care of SQL injection protection, and you will rarely write you own SQL. If you do, just follow the instructions on how to pass parameters to raw queries and prevent SQL Injections.

There is an entire chapter on the django book about security that should answer all your questions.

On what goes into /www/: anything that is not code? The concern is to not put the python code there.

On .htaccess: Yes, it should still work (for any non Django resources as Daniel points out).

On cronjobs: what do you mean?

On Libraries: Python – the language you will use with Django – is rich in libraries that probably provide the same functionality you are used to. This is a key point: you will need to learn Python well to benefit the most from Django.

On the admin interface: This is actually the thing that will probably help you the most, judging from your question. They are customizable (within some limits) and they really give the staff (it is not intended for public users, but for staff users) the basics of CRUD for your database models. It is a time saver. You might need to write your own templates for advanced functionality, but for most simple CRUD aimed at staff (which is usually the point of a CMS) it is very useful and easy to set up.

On integration: Check Pinax for a group of applications that provide extra functionality. There is a rich and diverse universe of integration solutions out there. It is not unusual to find questions here in SO about django + facebook and others.

On E-commerce: Check Satchmo out.

Is it worth it: Now, I have no experience with XAMPP. I know that I like Python better than both Perl and PHP (and Java, for that matter). I know that as a framework Django is simpler to use, faster to deploy than anything I used before.

My suggestion is the age old: go build a simple project and make up your own mind. You are the only one in position to decide if Django is the framework for you.

An older question on SO discusses some Django limitations. My answer to that might be helpful to you too.

👤cethegeek

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I recently moved to developing any new projects in Django, coming from a PHP background. Here are my thoughts on your questions.

1) Security

Strings sent to templates is escaped by default, which takes care of most of that. Since you’re using an ORM, SQL injection shouldn’t be an issue unless you build raw queries for some reason.

2) What goes in the /www/ public folder?

Django doesn’t use a file hierarchy for URLs like a typical PHP setup. The server knows what to run from your urls.py and settings.py pointer to the template folder.

3) Can I still use .htaccess on Django projects? I am familiar with Apache and often use it to do routing, or blocking off bad bots, but will using .htaccess still work?

As noted above, it works for static content just the same. For dynamic pages, you’d want to implement some other form of authentication or redirection for clients you want to block, as far as I know.

4) Cronjobs

There’s no reason why you can’t use cron for whatever, as you still have a normal Linux system.

5) Running Third party perl/other scripts

You’ll want to use the Python versions of those libraries, of course. For instance
FFMpeg
PythonMagick

I replaced most of my need for Curl with the built-in urllib and urrlib2 libraries, but there is also PyCurl if you need it.

6) Admin screen

The Admin screen is intended to be used by your own admins, i.e. site staff. It may be possible to do so, but it’s not supposed to be the scaffolding on which you build your public facing project.

7) Integration with Discuss, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, captcha, etc.

There are a lot of people out there using Python and Django, and I haven’t had any problem finding libraries. In my experience there is a bit less support for something than PHP, but what is there is often higher quality.

8) E-commerce, SSL

I haven’t tried payment integration, so I can’t say. Not sure about the other sites, but the Paypal Sandbox is run by Paypal, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s related to what you’re using on the server, so sure, you can access it like normal.

9) Is it worth it? Is it worth moving to Django from an XAMPP background? Will it really make things faster, or is that just marketing hype?

I moved to Django because Python is truly a more compelling language than PHP. Will it make things faster? I’m not sure what the advantages in that respect would be for Django vs.the PHP MVC frameworks. There are no magic bullets.

You do have to keep in mind that you’re not just learning a new framework, but also a new language. There will be a bit of a learning curve if you’ve never used Python before. but I’ve found both Python and Django to be fairly easy to learn. The clean design of the language is fantastic and Django is veryt well designed, too. I do feel that it’s boosting my productivity. I’ve found snippets for or articles about most everything I need to do in Django as I’ve been learning, so adapting has been pretty simple.

👤JAL

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