Obligatory: long time since last entry, been busy, went to Africa, blah blah blah.

Django Pronouncement

Titus: that's interesting. Think anything will come of his hope that Django and TurboGears "converge"? TurboGears guy says no; the approaches are too fundamentally different.

I've been using Django, unaware of TurboGear's existence. (Though I was using MochiKit, which is apparently part of it. Still, I missed the memo.) I love Django as a whole, but I hate their ORM. I want to be able to actually use the database properly, which means doing stuff like this:

    cursor.execute("update blah blah")
    if cursor.rowcount == expected:
        conn.commit()
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/') # back to here as a GET
    else:
        conn.rollback()
        return HttpResponse(tConflict.render(...)) # or whatever

Here I'm doing optimistic locking. I also use transactions to add tightly interrelated data at once; a lot of software which handles your primary keys for you doesn't do this well. I execute non-trivial joins. I tend to hand-code my SQL for this reason. But ORMs are trendy and everyone wants one. SQLAlchemy's website at least tells me that they understand my complaints. Their feature list includes:

• SQLAlchemy doesn't view databases as just collections of tables; it sees them as relational algebra engines.
• Eager-load a graph of objects and their dependencies via joins
• Commit entire graphs of object changes in one step
• You can use the connection pool by itself and deal with raw connections

ORMs which don't have those features are useless to me. Think Django will switch?