Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

Since my last article on integrating Storm with Django, I've merged my changes to Storm's trunk. This missed the 0.13 release, so you'll need to use Bazaar to get the latest trunk or wait for 0.14. The focus since the last post was to get Storm to cooperate with Django's built in ORM. One of the reasons people use Django is the existing components that can be used to build a site.

In my previous post about Django, I mentioned that I found the transaction handling strategy in Django to be a bit surprising. Like most object relational mappers, it caches information retrieved from the database, since you don't want to be constantly issuing SELECT queries for every attribute access. However, it defaults to commiting after saving changes to each object. So a single web request might end up issuing many transactions:

I've been playing around with Django a bit for work recently, which has been interesting to see what choices they've made differently to Zope 3. There were a few things that surprised me: The ORM and database layer defaults to autocommit mode rather than using transactions. This seems like an odd choice given that all the major free databases support transactions these days. While autocommit might work fine when a web application is under light use, it is a recipe for problems at higher loads.