Hi Jason, I'm not a Django dev and have nothing to do with GSOC but wanted to make some comments on your proposal because I'm interested in it from an end-user's perspective.
Jason Ledbetter wrote: >...But I could drop > the scripting idea and instead work off of a "batch options" object > and keep everything pure python. FWIW, this is the approach I would take, mostly because Python is what I'm most comfortable with. > I work for an insurance underwriting company and I've used Django very > successfully to automate finances, policy issuance, our contact books, > etc. It works great, but I'm working with what's probably an unusually > complex set of data (compared to most users of Django). So my idea for > the project comes from working in that environment. I'm in a similar boat. I write complex apps for the Energy Industry; our apps have what I consider very complex data sets. Testing them is *hard*. > You end up hobbling together scripts to generate valid but random data > in order to populate a given set of instances. I have such a script > here at work, to make sample insurance policies for our issuance > system. It's hundreds of lines of ugly, hard-to-read, boilerplate > code. The test module for our finite state machine is about 900 lines long. Ugly, boilerpplate, painful to update and/or customize for new test cases. That's just for the FSM. > In situations of sufficient complexity, the boilerplate code becomes > huge and you wear out the keys even *near* your copy and paste > shortcuts. That inevitably leads to bugs and with a sufficiently large > generating script, you fall into a "run it until it works" trudge. You > get to step 15 of the generation process and find out you typed > "underwriter" as "unserwriter" and you just wasted 25 minutes creating > an incomplete set. I feel this pain. > From what I can see, most Django users don't have needs that complex. > Right now Django isn't being used for things like insurance issuance > very often. but some of us DO... So I have a serious interest in your GSOC testing work. We are planning a major refactoring of our code base this year and testing is near the top of my priority list. I'm interested in following your progress, trying your code and reporting issues if you are open to it. If you start a mailing list or wiki or somesuch on your project, please announce it on django-dev so I can follow along. Best regards, Eric. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
