lecturefox

The hot web frameworks at the moment are Ruby on Rails and Django. Rails is based on the programming language Ruby. Django is based on Python. We started a month ago with Django. Our team has collect a list of the best Django resources on the web. These sites are very useful and can help a lot, especially when someone is coming from a windows development world.

1. djangoproject.com: documentation, code, community
2. Django Users: Google Groups section
3. The Django Book: 19 chapters for free (beta version)
4. Django Resources: link collection
5. djangosnippets.org: snippets collection
6. Django Cheat Sheet: syntax list
7. Installing Django on Windows: tutorial
8. Django Jumpstart: Build a To-do list in 30 Minutes - tutorial
9. Develop the Web with Python and Django: tutorial (IBM developer channel)
10. Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles

Tools of the trade: For the development with Windows I recommend Cygwin - a Linux-like environment for Windows - and Putty or Poderosa as client program.

Django works best with Apache and mod_python. As a professional hoster for our Django site lecturefox.com we have picked out WebFaction. As far as our experience goes WebFaction is a very good hoster for Python projects. They have a home-grown control panel as a powerful tool. In a few clicks you can manage your domains, e-mails and databases. The control panel offers one-click installers for lots of applications, including Ruby on Rails, Django, CherryPy, Pylons, TurboGears, Zope, Subversion, Trac.

Our experience with Django is growing, but we are at the beginning. One thing became obvious from day one of our work with the codebase. It’s a foxy framework and a lot of fun to work with. Happy coding!