Enlivepy A Different Approach to Html Templating in Python

Don’t worry - this blog entry won’t consist of me rambling about yet another templating engine that will change the world. Instead, I’ll be focusing on a practical aspect - the problems the current HTML templating libraries have and what can be possibly done about these issues.

Django and all other MVC/MVP frameworks do a great job at separating the Controller logic from the View logic. This way you can have all your complex operations in Controller and send back the data that needs to be shown or rendered to the end user. On the other end of this process you have a templating library - it takes Python objects and renders them.

Now, some of these templating libraries argue that having lots of logic in the representation layer is a bad thing (Django templating for example). Others, like Jinja2, are more lax and allow you to do lots of interesting things.

In both cases what we are actually doing is mixing data with logic. And while this might not seem like a problem with small applications, when you start operating on a greater scale, issues start to appear (a lot). Let me provide a few examples:

• Front end developers (CSS/HTML developers) start having difficulties when editing html pages when something does not appear the way it should be appearing. They have to learn the templating engine your framework uses.
• Sometimes HTML/CSS developers break the logic in html pages by replacing something by mistake.
• Backend developers are not the best at editing both HTML and CSS (well, in most cases, at least!). I have had this happen to me quite a few times too. I receive the HTML from a designer team, after that I put it into the templating engine...and it has a radically changed appearance. When I compare the way it looks on the server and the original things are just looking completely different.
• If HTML/CSS developers need to play or change something on the system, what they need is a working copy of the whole system. You need to give them ssh access to the staging server or something similar.

Read the rest of the article here.

Django Authentication Workflow

The existing Django Documentation explains everything about the Django authentication process in a pretty good way. Directions include adding your back end, replacing the built-in User model and many more. However, despite this good coverage, I had certain problems with seeing the big picture of the overall process. At times when I needed to create a new authentication backend, I always had to glance through the Django source again.

In this blog entry I’ll focus on the Django source code and documentation -- to be more exact, I will share my findings during reading both the source code and the documentation. Read the rest of the article on my new blog