Django 1.4 (and beyond)
There was an interesting video of a talk given by Alex Gaynor, a Django core committer, on the direction of the framework. Here’s the summary of what’s coming.
There is currently no release date set for Django 1.4 although work towards 1.4 happens in the public development trunk that can be checked out with SVN (http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/).
Django 1.4 will drop support for Python 2.4. The motivation behind the change is to use more context managers, a creation from Python 2.5, and make the internal Django code better.
Alex sees future base Django installations coming with less “stuff” by default with the option to install packages specific to your needs. For example, the EmailBackends would be an interface that if you needed SMTP support you would install a separate module to use.
Several current efforts for Django 1.4 or beyond that are going on are template compilation, composite fields, and making templates and forms better. Template compilation is a refactoring of the way the templating system works behind the scenes. The idea is to genericize the way templates work so other templating systems can use the shared infrastructure. Composite field improvements will enable better ways to query the database. Forms are difficult to work with in templates so this effort aims to improve how forms can be used within templates.
It’s interesting to see the dramatic change going on in the Rails community over 3.0/3.1 compared with the steady plodding along of Django. As both a Java and Python developer, it’s much easier to keep up with Django and know that my framework knowledge won’t be out of date within a year.
