James Tauber has launched Quisition, “a browser-based flashcard system that repeats old cards and introduces new ones at optimal time intervals.”

Quoth James:

Implementing this with Django has been a delight. Like Python in general, using it a combination of productive and fun that makes you just want to come up with more ideas you can develop with it.

Head on over and check it out.

Patrick Thomson has written an article called How to Beat Rails that outlines some ways that Python can “beat” Rails at the web application framework game.

It’s been getting quite a bit of buzz lately, and I’d be very curious to hear what others (i.e. real developers) had to say about it.

Portable Python allows you to run Python “directly from a portable device, enabling you to have, at any time, portable programming environment.” It’s a single zip file and is based on Python 2.5.

And the cool part is that it includes Django!

Update: So I loaded Portable Python 1.0 to try it out, and so far I’m very impressed. It was a snap to install (just unzip) and it comes with a “script runner” that makes testing applications easy:

I think this has just earned a spot on my portable drives. :)

Django 0.95.1 was released on January 21 and includes some small security fixes and a few bug fixes. It is recommended that everyone upgrade.

Here’s a short list of reasons to use Django instead of Rails:

Browsing around the wonderful programming.reddit.com last night, I came across a post titled Why Django kicks Ruby on Rails’ collective ass. This is an interesting article, mainly because in a sense it is right, but it goes about explaining Django’s benefits all wrong…

Worth reading if you are trying to compare both frameworks.

Update: The site is really slow right now. You might want to try it later.

KwangErn Liew asks which web framework is the best?

Update: Fixed the link.

Quoth David Pollak in his Web Framework Manifesto:

After touring a whole bunch of web frameworks, I’ve come to the conclusion that no existing framework satisfies the needs of a broad range of web developers. The existing web frameworks suffer from a wide variety of problems, conceptual and implementation-wise, that make way too much work for the web developer, the deployment guys, the folks who do application maintenance, and/or the end users.

Unfortunately he doesn’t have much to say about Python web frameworks because he has been “unable to wrap [his] head around Python.”

Looks like they skipped over Chapters 7 and 8 for now, but Chapter 9 is up.

There’s a page on the Django code wiki describing “a bare bones installation of Django on a USB stick using Movable Python.” It does not, however, cover getting a database installation on the stick.

Yet another Rails/Django Comparison:

In this paper, we compare the two frameworks from the point of view of a developer attempting to choose one of the two frameworks for a new project.

This one appears to be a little more “academic” than others. Check it out.

Thanks go to Lon for the link.