I started implementing the project Joollu(coming soon joollu).
I decided to use the Django framework. Because a) its done in python and b) I heard it was good for content-driven websites.
And boy it's intuitive, being a novice Python-programmer I felt it astonishing that I could implement my own video blog in less than approx. 10 hours. The documentation is equally astounding.
The Django framework has an object relational-mapper, that handles all your db-management for you, it's a very simple way of making a model layer. You only need to configure the things that are specfic for you, making it very rapid for simple features. I thought it might be a bigger task to implement the NADB, which is only based on interfaces, but then I discovered this notion of Generics implemented in Django.
Generics is used to associate a model object with any other object, without knowing anything about it's implementation. This is exactly what the NADB is all about. Instead of having a Video model class, I implemented a Physical(for storing files), viewable(for attributes like thumbnail, width/height etc.) and firstly an Entity class to represent the actual video, the only attribute here is name and id. None of these models know anything about the other on the DB-layer, instead I have a MediaManager, that can marshal a video from all its referred interfaces. Retrieving a video can be done like so:
>>> from joollu.core.models import *
>>> entity = Entity.objects.get(name="myvideo")
>>> physical = Physical.objects.get(content_object=e)
>>> viewable = Viewable.objects.get(content_object=e)
or more simply with a little wrapping
>>> from joollu.core.managers import MediaManager
>>> entity = Entity.objects.get(name="myvideo")
>>> video = MediaManager().filter_video(name="myvideo")
OR
>>> from joollu.core.managers import MediaManager
>>> entity = Entity.objects.get(name="myvideo")
>>> video = MediaManager().get_media(entity.id)
sadly it kinda impairs the possibilities of filtering and retrieving which is done very easily with Django. Here is an example for physical, if I want particular files:
>>> from joollu.core.models import *
>>> physical_list = Physical.objects.filter(file__endswith=".png")
>>> physical_list
[Physical: /Users/kennethnielsen/pythonspace/joollu/media/content/picture1.png]
Keeping the notions of things like video and images in the business layer increases flexibility. If I were to change attributes I can slap it on one of the exisitng interfaces or make a new one. Like if I want to save who and when something has been published, I can make a new model class Publishable and attach it to all content. This would be regardless of it being a video, image or other. It is up to the business layer to decide if published attributes are needed in specific cases. Comments is another example and so it goes..
There are a ton of other stuff worth mentioning about Django, it all just kinda fits together in this very intuitive framework. You should read up on it, or find the tech talk about it on google tech talks.
