Oct. 30, 2009
Here are some maddest of props for two great little bits of software we've been
using for RjDj work lately, and which might not be that well known yet.
Flot
Flot is a really nice little jQuery library which does
exactly what it says on the box: draws charts. It strikes a very nice balance
between smart, easy defaults, and being customisable.
http://code.google.com/p/flot/
South
South helps you with database migrations in
Django. Database migrations are where you have
made your models and deployed them live on the server, including having your
SQL tables created, but now you want to change something. People who are used
to the flexbility of Python find this situation frustrating. Instead of having
to manually write SQL to upgrade your tables to match your new models, South
will magically do the hard work for you. What's more is it will have that work
represented as Python code which you can customise, modify, and version in your
repository. Once again it strikes that balance between doing the right thing
and being customisable.
http://south.aeracode.org/
Honorable mention
The rest of our web stack looks like this: Debian GNU/Linux, lighthttpd,
python, django, lame, oggdec, postgresql, mysql, wordpress, phpbb3, boto, and
we use bzr for versioning.
Together these make as nice and friendly a collection of Free Software as there
ever was. Thanks, Free Software makers! You rule.
