The Django open source web framework is reportedly making 2012 a year of more proactive outreach as it extends its community communication efforts and also holds a series of conferences throughout the year to come.
Named after Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, this Python-authored framework, which follows the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern, champions the "reusability" and "plug-ability" of components for developers building complex database-driven websites.
The overseeing Open Bastion group has scheduled a number of Django conferences in 2012 and points out that this move comes at a time when PyCon has "capped its attendance" — a move that has been taken to ensure that it retains the essential community flavor it seeks to uphold in the spirit of open source.
According to a statement from chairman of the Python Software Foundation Steve Holden, "Larger conferences would be contrary to the ethos of the open source world, which does not necessary believe in economies of scale — large results are frequently obtained by quite small teams, though of course hardware and software has to scale on demand if a system meets with success in the marketplace, so this is not being driven by unfamiliarity with the concept."
Django's founders now hope to extend support for a wider democratic order to support the growth of this open developer technology at a time when the high profile sites including Pinterest, Instagram, and the U.S. Public Broadcast Service website are all making full use of the framework.
Tech analysts and industry commentators have been backing open frameworks for enterprise web application architectures since the turn of the decade if not beforehand; popular opinion suggests that developers today are more interested in the data models supported by the underlying framework than they are in the operating system or GUI per se. Some even suggest that as we now move to the cloud and to the Web with greater momentum, (for some users and developers) the operating system will fade into the background and become "just one of the component pieces" of architecture in the new user model.
NOTE: Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. Duplication (inadvertent or purposeful duplication) can lead to maintenance nightmares, poor factoring, and logical contradictions. Further, duplication (and the strong possibility of eventual contradiction) can arise anywhere: in architecture, requirements, code, or documentation. The effects can range from badly implemented code and developer confusion…to complete system failure.
