Announcing Garbaginator!

While working on Packaginator at the PyCon 2011 sprints we discovered some serious issues in the way that Django handles garbage collection. After a huge amount of work, we managed to isolate and fix the problem. This 'fix', as it were, was only possible by doing a very sophisticated 'hack' of critical internal components of the Django Web Application framework. We also discovered that similar issues occurred in other existing Python application frameworks such as Pyramid, Flask, Web.py, Web2Py, Grok, Twisted, Tornado, Google App Engine, and Rails.

Since then the Packaginator community has been fiercely debating what we should do with our newly created set of hacks. After a lot of arguments going both ways we've decided to come up with our own application framework and release it to the world under the GPL license.

This brand new application framework ignores the lessons learned from all the other Python frameworks and embraces the cutting edge concept of Not-Invented-Here. It focuses less on features and enhancements over existing systems and much, much more on the critical concept of formal Garbage handling.

Some of the critical modules include:

• RubberGloves (for handling dirty objects)
• Django-Garbaginator
• Flask-Recycling
• Pyramid-Garbaginator
• Web.2.py Garbaginator Bridgerator ('cause people always get Web2Py and web.py confused with each other so we bridged them together)
• BlueBream

Check out the home page at: http://garbaginator.cartwheelweb.com

Fork Garbaginator on GitHub: https://github.com/cartwheelweb/garbaginator

Note: This was an April Fool's Day Joke

Show me your open source Django blog application

Want your blog engine to be used by NASA?

Unlike everyone else in the Django world, I have not written a blog application.

Instead I want to use your blog application. Definitely for my upcoming blog transfer to my own personal site (Blogger's limitations annoy me), and possibly for use in NASA Science Mission Directorate Spacebook project. So what am I looking for in your blog?

In no particular order these are the must-haves:

• Elegant user interface.
  
• Follows Django/Python best practices.
• Easy to integrate into another application (which should be the case if you followed the above point).
  
• Code highlighting via pygments.
• Relies on JQuery for JavaScript, and degrades properly.
• Publishes legal RSS feeds.
• Allows for use of several input formats (Restructured Text, Markdown, etc)
  
• Hooks for integrating WYSIWYG editor
• Allows for multiple users each with their own blog.
• Renders humanely in FF, Safari, and IE 6, 7, and 8.
• Any sort of decent documentation.

In no particular order these are the nice-to-haves:

• Publishes ATOM feeds.
• Allows for multiple users on a particular blog.
• Already has a WYSIWYG editor.
• Handy import/export functions that follow whatever standards Blogger might have.

Candidate killers:

• I have my own server space. Plus, NASA has its own servers. So Google App Engine compliant blog systems need to also support the standard Django ORM.
• I am doing this in Django/Pinax/Python/PostGreSql on Linux. Systems that do not play well there need not apply.
  

What do you get out of this if I pick your blog engine?

Well, as much as I am a fan of Pinax, the default blog application doesn't do everything we want it to do for Spacebook. So your application might become the blog engine used by us. And when we launch, we'll be sharing credit with anyone who contributed from the open source community to our efforts.

Edit on August 26th, 2010: I solved how to do this research by co-authoring Django Packages which gives us this handy reference. Also, at this point in time, as part of larger systems, I've written several blog systems for clients.

Spacebook ITCD demo a success!

Yesterday Katie Cunningham presented on Web 2.0 and our latest implementation, Spacebook at the ITCD NASA HQ event. As always, she nailed the presentation, and handled the questions with skill and grace. Before and after the presentation we demonstrated live Spacebook at our booth. People seemed very interested, and we became skilled and hooking people into Spacebook.

I received the chance to proselytize on the benefits we had from using the Free and Open Source Software community to accelerate our development. We would not have been able to demonstrate a stable, working application without the contribution of the Pinax team. The amount of support we received from them was incredible. In fact, our requirements are helping to drive the growth of Pinax, and thanks to us they will be US Government Section 508 compliant.