FAQ: General¶
Why does this project exist?¶
Django grew from a very practical need: World Online, a newspaper web operation, is responsible for building intensive web applications on journalism deadlines. In the fast-paced newsroom, World Online often has only a matter of hours to take a complicated web application from concept to public launch.
At the same time, the World Online web developers have consistently been perfectionists when it comes to following best practices of web development.
In fall 2003, the World Online developers (Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison) ditched PHP and began using Python to develop its websites. As they built intensive, richly interactive sites such as Lawrence.com, they began to extract a generic web development framework that let them build web applications more and more quickly. They tweaked this framework constantly, adding improvements over two years.
In summer 2005, World Online decided to open-source the resulting software, Django. Django would not be possible without a whole host of open-source projects – Apache, Python, and PostgreSQL to name a few – and we’re thrilled to be able to give something back to the open-source community.
What does “Django” mean, and how do you pronounce it?¶
Django is named after Django Reinhardt, a jazz manouche guitarist from the 1930s to early 1950s. To this day, he’s considered one of the best guitarists of all time.
Listen to his music. You’ll like it.
Django is pronounced JANG-oh. Rhymes with FANG-oh. The “D” is silent.
We’ve also recorded an audio clip of the pronunciation.
Is Django stable?¶
Yes, it’s quite stable. Companies like Disqus, Instagram, Pinterest, and Mozilla have been using Django for many years. Sites built on Django have weathered traffic spikes of over 50 thousand hits per second.
Does Django scale?¶
Yes. Compared to development time, hardware is cheap, and so Django is designed to take advantage of as much hardware as you can throw at it.
Django uses a “shared-nothing” architecture, which means you can add hardware at any level – database servers, caching servers or web/application servers.
The framework cleanly separates components such as its database layer and application layer. And it ships with a simple-yet-powerful cache framework.
Who’s behind this?¶
Django was originally developed at World Online, the web department of a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. Django’s now run by an international team of volunteers.
How is Django licensed?¶
Django is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license. This is an open source license granting broad permissions to modify and redistribute Django.
Why does Django include Python’s license file?¶
Django includes code from the Python standard library. Python is distributed under a permissive open source license. A copy of the Python license is included with Django for compliance with Python’s terms.
Which sites use Django?¶
DjangoSites.org features a constantly growing list of Django-powered sites.