I was back home in Scotland in June and my dad happened to mention a problem he was having at work: he does forensic computer analysis and had written a case tracking system for his department in Access. However, the data model wasn’t normalized and he was finding it difficult to extend it to meet their growing needs. I’m not familiar with Access but I poked around a bit and did some googling, and it seemed like we could get it to at least support a couple of his desired changes, but it wasn’t going to be pretty.

It got me to thinking though, and when I got back to the States, I decided to try out re-implementing the system using Django. Django is a web framework for Python, and I had been meaning to find time to try it out for a while. You define your data models as Python objects and Django handles the ORM to get your data in and out of a database. It also provides APIs to query and manipulate the data easily from Python, and templating to help you display data in web pages.

I won’t presume that I could describe Django better than its authors, however, so here’s its features lifted straight from djangoproject.com:

Object-relational mapper
Define your data models entirely in Python. You get a rich, dynamic database-access API for free — but you can still write SQL if needed.
Automatic admin interface
Save yourself the tedious work of creating interfaces for people to add and update content. Django does that automatically, and it's production-ready.
Elegant URL design
Design pretty, cruft-free URLs with no framework-specific limitations. Be as flexible as you like.
Template system
Use Django's powerful, extensible and designer-friendly template language to separate design, content and Python code.
Cache system
Hook into memcached or other cache frameworks for super performance — caching is as granular as you need.
Internationalization
Django has full support for multi-language applications, letting you specify translation strings and providing hooks for language-specific functionality.

What particularly attracted me to Django is its amazing out-of-the-box administration interface. Django was developed in a news room environment, so they put together a pretty full-featured administration interface that lets journalists enter news articles, mark them for display on the newspaper’s public pages, and so on. The public-facing part of the site then uses Django’s template system in conjunction with is MVC framework to retrieve and present the data entered via the admin interface.

In my use case, the system would only be used by a small number of people, all of whom would have at least some form of administrative access. So, I figured I could get a pretty usable system without having to do any ‘webby’ stuff at all. And that’s been pretty much my experience: the bulk of the system is in two Python source files: one that defines the data model; and one that customizes the administration interface.

Django works with multiple databases, including SQLite, for which I have a definite soft spot. It also comes with a for-development web server built-in. Given the small number of users, I hoped that I could use SQLite and the built-in web server for the final version, thereby saving my dad from having to install and maintain database and web servers. The built-in server isn’t meant to be used in production, but we’ll see how it does. The system doesn’t have enough run time on it yet, but if it proves unreliable then switching to a full web server won’t be too painful. I don’t foresee SQLite being a bottleneck, but if it does we can switch it to MySQL or Postgres or something, although I’d need to convert the data to do that probably.

The Django site has an excellent four-part tutorial that walks you through most of its aspects. It was certainly enough to get me going. The online documentation for the APIs is also very good. It didn’t take long at all to get a proof-of-concept up and running for my dad to try out. We used basecamp to keep track of things as we worked through the nitty gritty of the design, git to track the source, and a couple of Django sites at my web host so my dad could play with the system as it came together (kudos to Andrew at dreamhost for helping me get Passenger WSGI going with Django by the way).

In just a few weeks of working on it spare time the system is up and running, complete with a couple of reports (HTML and CSV) and some features not envisaged at the outset (ain’t that always the way?). I even wrote an importer that took the old cases from Access via a CSV file and imported them into the new one, using Django’s model classes so that I didn’t even have to write a single INSERT statement.

If you're a pythony sort of person then I highly recommend taking a look at Django for your next webby projecty thingy.