Django Windmill Tests – GSOC Progress Update

I feel that a status update is long overdue, but as the corpus of Windmill tests grows, so does the time it takes to run a complete instance of the regression suite. However, I do have some fun progress to report as well as a few questions/problems that are showing themselves now that all the fluff is over. First, let’s talk about the fun stuff!

I do have 3 of my major improvements/fixes/restructures to django.test somewhat complete. At the moment they are lacking most in documentation, a problem I intended to rectify later this week.

1. Windmill Tests: Windmill test runners are nearly complete, threaded development server for AJAX widget testing complete.
2. Code Coverage: Coverage.py support for runtests.py and management command. Extensible system is easily pluggable with other coverage systems.
3. Test-Only Models: This is still a topic of discussion, but adding the property ‘test_models’ to a TestSuite will load and wipe the models. Has tests and limited docs.

My major TODO’s still outstanding:

• Documentation!
• Twill Runner Support (Utilizing the Windmill Threaded Server)
• Windmill Admin Regression Tests (Healthy set of tests written, need to document and finish more)
• Skip tests that are known to fail
• Test new features/API’s

That’s it for now, more updates are available on the django-dev list!

Google Summer of Code 2009 – Django Testing – Coding Day 1

Among all the excitement of the past few weeks, the start of GSOC appears to have snuck up on me! Started work today on the coverage runner. My progress is easily followed on my GitHub Django fork (until we get real SVN branches). Can’t wait to start posting some real results!

Google Summer of Code 2009: Django Testing Updates!

So my Google Summer of Code: 2009 project proposal was accepted! I will be working on a 2 phase project revolving around Django’s testing framework, and regression suite. Most notebly, I plan to:

• Implement Windmill test coverage for Django’s Infamous contrib.admin
• Provide several missing features/conveniences to the Django testing tools

While it may not be the most glamorous project, I’m excited for it! When paired with my epic mentors, (the ever-infamous Eric Holscher and notorious George Song) it looks to be a solid summer. You can expect me to post weekly status updates here, as well as anything else relevant to the project. As my ‘get to know Django and make sure I can conform with coding standards etc.’ ticket, I’m planning to add an assertion which checks for dead links after template rendering. Or, as its better known, Django Ticket #5418.

I want to also give a quick thanks to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Eric Holscher, Jannis Leidel and all the other PyCon 2009 Sprinters who helped me create the proposal.

Finally! A Django IDE with Real Code Completion and Template Support

Now it seems like forever ago, but I have been on the hunt for a good Django IDE for a very long time. I have tried PyDev, Aptana, Komodo, TextMate, Vim, Emacs, Wing IDE and every variation in between, but was never satisfied with the featurset. I wanted complete python language support and completion, complete support for Django Templates, total HTML support, as well as complete Javascript (specifically jQuery) support. Most editors made the mistake of having support for some of those individually, but I can’t get javascript support inside of a Django Template etc.

The magical and awesome app that represents the first real attempt at a complete Django development environment? Netbeans!

I know it sounds crazy, but progress is being made, and while its a boatload of effort to get it built, and even then, not much of the promised featureset actually works. But those are just details, examination of the code available at:

http://code.google.com/p/netbeans-django/

shows some real work being done towards a Django project type. Moreover, a recent blog post from someone at Sun alludes to this support being available as soon as Netbeans 7.0.

Perhaps this is just another let down waiting to happen, but the existing Python code support is fantastic, and significant strides appear to already have been made towards the goal of total Django integration. If you want to try out the existing language support, just grab the Netbeans 7M2 build and install the Python plugin!

Can Someone Get Us A Real Django IDE?

So the more I work with Django the more I long for a solid development environment to work in. I use Wingware for much of my python development, with its rockin debugger and code completion, its more than I could ask for. Until the curse of the Java class. This quarter I’m taking a Java projects course, most of the class uses Eclipse but a few use Netbeans. My problem is, I got spoiled so fast by the incredible templates support, content suggestions, quick fixes and always dead on code completion. Going back to Wing feels like a halfway-there IDE. I know that pythons interpreted nature makes source completion much more difficult, now I would argue that with an interpreter, you could actually step through the code to some extent. However, I respect that dynamic objects are never gonna be easy to support. My beef is with the lack of support for super-popular frameworks (this goes for everybody!) Ruby on Rails has literally dozens of solid IDEs and a few that are just spectacular (see Aptana, or Netbeans). Why can’t I get even basic highlighting support for my Django templates? Why can’t I get any completion options on Models except my own?

Its just frustrating, Django is still a pleasure to develop in, even with just Gedit and a terminal, but is it really out of the question to consider providing a big pretty environment for those of us that like that?

I did dig up this and this. I guess its a step in the right direction, but its almost embarrassing next to the Rails environments.