Sessions at DjangoCon US 2011 on Monday 5th September

This tutorial teaches students how to create beautiful, interactive maps for the web. When asked to display geodata, most developers decide to put some big red markers on an embeddable Google Map and call it a day. If you're interested in creating maps that are more beautiful, more interactive, and more usable, this tutorial is for you.

By the end of this tutorial, students will be able to build a light version of Trulia's crime maps: http://trulia.com/crime/

Hour 1: The back-end

• Storing geodata in PostgreSQL
• Querying geodata with GeoDjango
• Ways to customize GeoDjango's admin

Hour 2: The front-end

• Displaying geodata on a map with Polymaps
• Creating and designing map tiles with TileStache

Hour 3: Dessert

• Adding interactivity to maps
• How to make geodata pretty

Testing in Django is easy if you're testing models against your database. What happens when you need to test other-systems, like a search engine, or an API? This tutorial will cover how I built SphinxTestCase, ESTestCase and redisutils to allow us to maintain test coverage on our web sites.

Testing backends other than your database can be tricky. It's entirely necessary, however, otherwise you'll start getting glaring holes in terms of coverage.

This tutorial will show you how to subclass TestCase and properly setup and teardown external systems.

It will also show you how to be nice to your other developers who may want to opt-out of testing backend systems (like search).

All proceeds earned from this tutorial will go to the Pyladies sponsors program.

This will be a walk-through of the Django Tutorial, where everyone works together with the instructor and lab-assistants to complete the tutorial. If enough time remains, we'll also use one of the new Django hosts (such as http://gondor.io or http://djangozoom.com) to post student projects on-line.

Students need to already have Python 2.6/2.7 installed on their machine and have already completed an introductory Python course such as http://learnpythonthehardway.org.

We all know that Django makes building web apps with python really easy, but few realize that Amazon Web Services makes deploying scalable fault tolerant applications just as easy! This class will focus on taking a provided Django web application and deploying it to AWS through a series of hands on exercises using many of the AWS services and some very easy to use open source Django applications.

In this class we will start with a demo Django app that they will use for the rest of the exercises. Before getting started there will be a brief intro to Boto, a python project that makes working with AWS a joy.

An application that works great in development and test can be crushed by real-life deployment. Don't let your project be one of them. In a hands-on workshop, fix a (realistically) broken Django example so that it can hold its head high under load.

Your Django application runs wonderfully in test and in beta, and with great fanfare you launch it, and... it falls over and goes boom. The speed of development that frameworks like Django give you can result in some ugly secrets when the application experiences real load for the first time.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll take a (supplied) Django application and fix it up so that it can survive in the wild. Topics will include caching in all its myriad forms, getting the most out of the ORM, database optimization, and deployment environments. We’ll use PostgreSQL as the underlying database, but the techniques here are applicable to any database and, indeed, nearly any application development environment.

Among the topics we'll cover are:

• Model design for best performance.
• Optimal indexing strategy.
• Effective caching.
• Transaction management and avoiding lock conflicts.
• Efficient use of the ORM.
• When and how to move work into the database.
• External caches, poolers and load balancers for high-volume sites.
• How to debug performance at the database level.