Living on the Edge

This Week in Django 32 - 2008-08-03

Posted on August 05, 2008

This Week in Django is a weekly podcast about all things Django.

This week we have a very special guest, Justin Bronn, creator of GeoDjango the GIS branch of Django. We also discuss a few source commits, some cool projects from the community, and the Tip of the Week.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

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Show Notes

Big News (0:48)

Interview – Justin Bronn (5:11)

Justin Bronn is a computer scientist and third-year law student at the University of Houston who enjoys studying legal topics related to intellectual property and spatial law. Prior to creating GeoDjango, Justin worked as a patent engineer for an intellectual property boutique in Houston and developed scientific data analysis applications for the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

CartoAnalytics is Justin Bronn’s consulting company. CartoAnalytics provides innovative solutions to harness the power of your geospatial data.

Tracking Trunk (39:51)

Community Catchup (48:10)

  • Admin Image Widget Pete Baumgartner, LincolnLoop, posted this nice snippet that displays an image instead of a file path if the current file is an image. If you read the comments, another user updated the code generating the thumbnails to use the popular django open source project sorl-thumbnail
  • How Django is good for SEO Patrick Beeson is a project manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, TN. In the past Patrick has published a few good django related posts but this was is of interest because it discussed one of the many “out of the box” application benefits the django toolset provides.
  • django-assets – Asset management for Django. Automatically compresses javascript files. Supports the following filters: jsmin, jspacker, csstidy, cssutils, yui_js, yui_css, gzip, cssrewrite.

Tip of the Week (1:00:50)

Use decorator_from_middleware to create a decorator that can be used in your views, which wraps up a middleware class.


from django.utils.decorators import decorator_from_middleware 
from django.middleware.middlewaremodule import MiddlewareClass 

decoratorfunc = decorator_from_middleware(MiddlewareClass)

This code is not documented but added as part of cache reworking. See this thread for more information:

Thank You! (1:03:19)

Filed under: Django Netcasts | Tagged with: django djangocon geodjango gis jbronn news podcast twid  |

Comments
  1. sean – August 05, 2008 @ 05:09 AM

    Thanks for your excellent work! GeoDjango seems to be quite interesting to me

  2. Matthew Wensing – August 05, 2008 @ 10:52 AM

    Justin mentioned Backyard Post on the show. Here’s a link to the site (a work in progress that is pending a total redesign to make it less newspapery): http://www.backyardpost.com

    We heart GeoDjango!

  3. huxley – August 05, 2008 @ 04:00 PM

    FYI, Jacob has proposed on django-developers that Beta 1 be postponed in favour of Alpha 2 due to the merging of fairly sizable items like GeoDjango, signal refactor and file storage refactor. Beta 1 would happen next week.

    Django 1.0 is still due to come out on schedule.

  4. brosner – August 08, 2008 @ 01:16 AM

    @huxley,

    Thanks for mentioning that. We did indeed see that on django-developers, but it was posted after recording the show. We will certainly be mentioning it on our next show :)

  5. springmeyer – August 11, 2008 @ 11:05 PM

    Another new resource for getting started with GeoDjango is available on google code at: http://code.google.com/p/geodjango-basic-apps/

    You’ll find a sample project/app, `Geographic Admin`, complete with geographic sample data in shapefile format, scripts to automatically load it within your database, and a pre-built view to demo the capabilities of the Admin and Databrowse using GeoDjango functionality.

    A tutorial at http://code.google.com/p/geodjango-basic-apps/wiki/GeographicAdminQuickStart walks you through setting it up with PostgreSQL/PostGIS.