Caspio and frameworks...

Mr. Hartnett up in trendy, swanky Palm Beach Co. gets the nod for finding this interview with David Milliron of Caspio.

Now I'm not as anti-Caspio as a lot of some people, who are way smarter than me. We've seen the blowups between Milliron and various bloggers.

In fact, for full disclosure, I pushed for my current employer to get involved with Caspio when I started back in October.

I think Caspio is absolutely, positively great for allowing reporters to put up searchable tools. Especially if a reporter has pieced together a small database on their own and needs a way to get it out there. But I don't think it's the ultimate solution, either.

But Milliron's quote here really gets me:

"Publishers are looking for tools that do not require huge upfront costs. More and more publishers are outsourcing the creation and maintenance of their database applications. A relative low entry point with a high return on investment is the mantra for today’s online database publishing world."

With all due respect, that's because newspaper owners are dumb. And their schemes, cheap ways and monopolistic haughtiness is what got our industry into the situation we face today.

We need research and development. We need investment in new ways of providing content. And that's not a one-size-fits-all application like Caspio.

Again, I think it serves its role well. But in the end, we need imaginative, new research and development that keeps readers reading our papers and Web sites. Please, no more schemes.

Kind of weird situation....

So I get back from IRE all fired up. Especially after the Django boot camp, which gets a big thumbs up from me to all the people who worked so hard to put it on.

But at the same time, the Tribune stuff is no secret. Now I know how the French aristocracy must've felt when the Bastille was stormed. It's a little weird when you know there's an ax waiting to fall, you just don't know when or where.

That being said, I'm still excited about the future of journalism, thanks to great speeches by the legendary Phil Meyer and people like Aron Pilhofer.

Aron left us with what I think is the quote of the conference:

"You can't outsource the future."

So what did I like most? It'd have to be the Django boot camp. Maybe that's because I'm a sucker for anything hands-on.

First great revelation about Django (or Ruby on Rails) for me is this: It really forces you to think about relationships and good database design.

As a user of Caspio, a lot of times you want to take the easy way and just create a single table. Yes, I know you can use views and lookups and all that jazz, but it's kind of a pain in the tail for me.

A frameworks like Rails or Django forces you to think about not only what you want now, but what you might want in the future. That's a good thing.

Again, more to come.

Ruby

So while taking Aron Pilhofer to the airport on Sunday, he gave me a nice rundown on Ruby on Rails (and, as a sidebar, Ruby itself). It was interesting enough to convince me to give it a look.

If you're even remotely interested, do yourself a favor and check this out. It kind of gives you a nice little overview of Ruby.

In other news, I got a new Django book in the mail last week. Was intending to mess with it today, but had to take the wife to the hospital when she sliced her paw open while using scissors on flowers at work.

OK. I lied. Sort of.

Ok, so the other night I posted this, proclaiming mission accomplished on my little Django problem. However, in my late-night bliss, I forgot it was only half the problem.

I'm also having trouble getting a search form to work properly. Hopefully this will be easier, mainly because I was able to get the search stuff figured out here. My problems actually started because I wanted to know how to display the other fields in the example.

Anyhow, I plan to work on this later today if I can get some more pressing stuff out of the way. Otherwise, it'll probably be tonight.

Then I plan to move on to learning how to create a URL-driven search page similar to this. We'll see what happens.

Django and success

Too bad I can't bring in Borat to give a nice "Success!"

After several days of beating my head against the wall, bugging Derek Willis and Matt Waite to the point they probably would like to shoot me, I finally figured out my Django woes.

For days, I was having any trouble getting beyond Chapter 7 in The Django Book. There's the spot where the author shows you the template. More specifically, the place where you show the search results in the loop.

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to show additional data. Waite beat it into my head that it didn't have anything to do with the data request in the view or model --- i.e., it is the equal of

select * from table

whether I like it or not.

I kept trying to modify

      {% for book in results %}
       
{{ book|escape }}
     {% endfor %}

into something like:

{% for book in results %}
       
{{ book|escape }} {{ anothervariable }} 
     {% endfor %}

Or

{% for book in results %}
       
{{ book|escape }} {{ modelname.anothervariable }} 
     {% endfor %}

And I tried all kinds of different things. I tried Waite's suggestion to do some sequential error checking to identify whether it's the url, the view or the template. But assuming it isn't dumb luck, I discovered something that finally broke through to my slow brain.

I apparently needed this:

{% for book in results %}
       
{{ book|escape }} {{ book.anothervariable }} 
     {% endfor %}

Again, assuming that's what I needed (and this isn't luck), I think I've gotten past the big brain block and hopefully Django will be a little easier to digest. I can already see the awesome and amazing speed with which you can put together an app.

For some reason, I assumed I needed to reference the model name, apparently forgetting the basics so clearly illustrated here in crayon-like colors for dense-minded people like myself.

That being said, it's cool I've needed to learn so little Python to make something useful (OK, I haven't made anything useful to anyone ELSE yet). As someone who attempts to use Perl, I wasn't looking forward to the idea of learning another scripting language.

So thanks to all who helped. And thanks to my random late Friday night (I have no life, apparently) find from Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

I feel much better now.

After I published this rant, things got a lot better.

I downloaded MySQL and installed an instance on my local machine. By pointing Django there, I was able to get the connection and things started clicking. So I'm pretty confident that it was Tribune blocking the port, not me being an idiot. At least this time.

It's the small things that piss me off.

So I've embarked on learning Django. Again. But this time with gusto.

However, just like any other language, it's the small things that trip you up.

I spent a decent portion of today trying to figure out why I could not get Django to talk with a DBMs of some sort. First up was SQL Server.

The Django Book appears to indicate you can use ado_mssql. But after numerous trips in Chapter 5, particularly with the following:

>>> from django.db import connection
>>> cursor = connection.cursor()

I kept getting getting an error message. Best I could tell, the SQL Server part isn't really supported yet. But I could be wrong.

Then I decided to move on to MySQL, considering that's what everyone is using anyhoo. I could absolutely not get a connection. I was trying to use a MySQL install on my A Small Orange account...But no luck. I couldn't figure out the problem --- I checked my settings over and over, even e-mailed tech support.

Still no luck.

Best I can tell, it's because of Tribune's block of port 3306. Knowing we had an MySQL install here on one of our CAR boxes, I tried to get that working. That would seemingly show whether it was Tribune blocking the port or my idiocy.

So we'll try again tonight when I get home. But I've got my money on the port being blocked.

Frameworks!

So far, I've played around with Django here at home. But I've done nothing more than display the date and time. What can I say? I got sidetracked.

But I see IRE is going to offer a Web frameworks bootcamp during the conference in Miami. Yay!