I wish there was something like this for rails - well written, concise and keeps the newbies away from things that'll hurt them. In particular, some major pain points:
1. Use rbenv or rvm. Half the problems I notice with beginners stem from installing rails with apt-get or something.
2. Your controller is meant to be simple glue between model and view - if you're putting tons of code in there, you're doing it wrong.
3. Unit test. A lot. This is especially good for beginners because you often make little errors when you're starting out.
4. Unit testing isn't enough. Functional testing is important too.
5. Learn about your hosting provider. Specific to Heroku, if you're on the free plan, every dyno spin-up takes absolutely forever if you don't have a steady stream of visitors.
> 2. Your controller is meant to be simple glue between model and view - if you're putting tons of code in there, you're doing it wrong.
Yes, fat models are the way to go. This is just a good rule of thumb for any MVC framework. I feel like no framework docs actually explain this. Newbies end up shooting themselves in the foot because they don't understand the reason for separation or understand where logic should be implemented.
That's very debatable, and pretty rails-specific, IMHO. Conventional wisdom in other ecosystems is instead to have a business logic layer between your controller and your persistence layer. I've always found this to be good advice, as it makes the code more testable and makes reasoning about manipulating different models in the same operation easier.
I started reading about Django recently so this is a noob question, but what's the controller in Django? All I've seen with with a lot of code is models, views, and templates. It's kind of annoying how tutorials talk about MVC but it doesn't seem like an MVC framework.
Also, if I want a user to input numbers to do calculations, where does the computationally heavy code go?
For most intents and purpose, "controllers" from so called MVC frameworks are referred to as "views" in Django.
The article that edavis mentions does make one good point, which is that the term "view" was chosen to emphasize the notion that the python callback function (or object) sets up a view of the data represented by the models. I think there's something good in this choice of words. I find the terms "view" and "template" more intuitively meaningful than the corresponding "controller" and "view".
One important, substantive difference that I'm aware of between controllers in many MVC frameworks (probably not all) and views in Django is that a lot of MVC frameworks map requests to controller actions through URL traversal, whereas Django offers a more hands-on approach with URL confs.
Also, whereas controllers are often implemented through classes in MVC frameworks, views in Django may be implemented through any callable object which accepts a request and returns a response.
As far as where your code should go, it probably depends on what kind of data the user is entering. If the data must be persisted in the database somehow, such as with transactions in a bank account, then the code that crunches the numbers would probably be in a method on a "BankAccount" or "Transaction" model class. If it's data that only really needs to persist for the user's individual browsing session, then it's probably safe to put the code that works on it in a view. Django limits what kinds of things you can do in its templates (thankfully), so you probably won't have much luck putting your computation code in a template.
I'm somewhat new to Django, and I'm just curious if Heroku is the best solution out there for Django? I've heard some good things about Gondor, and apparently it's more tailored for Django apps, but I'd be curious to know what the HN consensus is on Django hosting that won't collapse on you if you get HNed/Reddited.
1. Use rbenv or rvm. Half the problems I notice with beginners stem from installing rails with apt-get or something.
2. Your controller is meant to be simple glue between model and view - if you're putting tons of code in there, you're doing it wrong.
3. Unit test. A lot. This is especially good for beginners because you often make little errors when you're starting out.
4. Unit testing isn't enough. Functional testing is important too.
5. Learn about your hosting provider. Specific to Heroku, if you're on the free plan, every dyno spin-up takes absolutely forever if you don't have a steady stream of visitors.