| It was an itch I wanted to scratch. I’d been tempted to convert my entire (Django-based) blog over to something like Hyde[1], but wanted a bit more flexibility than the framework provided. In most applications I work on, I lovingly use and abuse Memcached, Redis, and Varnish. If you’re working on an application that warrants using a live website and the whole application server shebang, then yes, I’d agree with you. But for something like my blog and other non-dynamic websites which don’t update very much at all, I’m not sure if I see a pressing need for an application server. My blog previously ran varnish-nginx-uwsgi-django, but I was moving off of a VPS and it was the last thing left on that server. I got curious. In the case of something like the L.A. Times’ Data Desk[2] projects (who use their own django-bakery app), if some views are very expensive/slow to generate, you can offload the work from the application server and do it in advance. (This makes sense if you want to just render everything out on a fast workstation or if you have a local database of several hundred gigabytes that you don’t want a live server querying to crunch the data.) It’s not out of the question to pregenerate HTML pages, JSON for visualizations, and simple image files (generated in PIL). In any case: it’s not so much a question of “high traffic apps” as much as the tradeoff between (computation cost + server maintenance cost) and (app that is server-side dynamic or updates frequently). Most people don’t want to configure and maintain an app server (with cache layers and all) for a simple app and those that don’t seem to have uptime issues the moment they get any legitimate traffic: see [3]. So: * I decided I didn’t want to maintain an app server for my blog, and my historical average for updates is about once every four weeks (or even more infrequent).
* People seemed to be big fans of Jekyll/Hyde, Movable Type’s static publishing mode[4], WP Super Cache, etc.
* I felt a Django-friendly analogue to those would be cool.
* Like any developer tinkering with their own blog, there didn’t have to be a point. [1]: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/hyde/
[2]: http://datadesk.latimes.com/
[3]: http://inessential.com/2011/03/16/a_plea_for_baked_weblogs
[4]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/18/brent-baked |