Monday, November 10, 2008
Decorators allow developers to use aspect oriented approach. Here is an example of a custom python/django decorator that checks if the user is a super user and redirects it to login page if not
def super_user(func):
def call(request, *args, **kwds):
user = request.user
if user.is_authenticated() and user.is_superuser:
return func(request, *args, **kwds)
else:
return utils.redirect(settings.LOGIN_URL)
return call
Here is an example usage:@super_user
def my_view(request):
pass
Saturday, November 08, 2008
While playing with django debug toolbar, I noticed that some page on my application causes serious amount of queries that is being executed. One page actually executes around 580 queries so I investigated and noticed that this was caused probably by lazy initialization, not using select_related() on my queries and i'm caching QuerySet object instead of list.
An example of a getter function on my model:
@property
def data(self):
cache_data = getattr(self, 'cache_data', None)
if cache_data:
return cache_data
else:
self.cache_data = TimecardData.objects.filter(timecard_day=self)
return self.cache_data
The code above retrieves all the associated data on my timecard but to prevent it from hitting the database everytime i call that data() method, i need to cache it. One mistake I did is to cache the returned query set instead of casting it to a list type because whenever the cache_data is retrieved, It will again hit the database since it's only a query set. After refactoring the above code to this one:@property
def data(self):
cache_data = getattr(self, 'cache_data', None)
if cache_data:
return cache_data
else:
self.cache_data = list(TimecardData.objects.select_related()
.filter(timecard_day=self))
return self.cache_data
The queries was reduced from 560 to 300 queries. Further looking at the problem, I refactored the code to this one:I still have a long way debugging the problem but I hope this helps you aswell. @property
def data(self):
cache_data = getattr(self, 'cache_data', None)
if cache_data != None:
return cache_data
else:
self.cache_data = list(TimecardData.objects.select_related().filter(timecard_day=self))
return self.cache_data
The code above to this one checks using "if cache_data" but since empty list returns false if evaluated, it queries the database again instead of using cache. This one brought the queries from 580 to 120 (a very big difference)
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
I'm not sure If I'm the only one who feel that the date/time module in python 2.5 is very hard to use. If any of you ever tried using joda time, you'll notice that it's way to easy compared to python's date/time library.
Correct me If i'm wrong but joda time was created by Google guys so I hope that in the near future, python will have a better date/time library (since Google is the main supporter of python).
Saturday, October 18, 2008
As I was browsing, I came across an article used to host python web applications better. The module called 'mod_wsgi' is a new&better apache module than mod_python when hosting django/python apps. I haven't personally tried it (maybe I will this coming weekend) but the comments by other people are very interesting. Anyway to give you some short round-up, this are the things that it can do:
- Can serve dynamic content by about 100-150% faster compare to mod_python
- Consumes less memory
- Secure (Don't know yet why it's secure)
Links:
http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/
http://www.technobabble.dk/2008/aug/25/django-mod-wsgi-perfect-match/
http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/django_apache_and_mod_wsgi
Saturday, October 18, 2008
I don't know why python did'nt simply followed the standard way of using a ternary operator. Instead of following the usual format:
(x > 10) ? true_value : false_value
Python uses a different one:
x > 10 and true_value or false_value
