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From 2013.igem.org

Concept transferred to django framework

Having distributed diverse tasks e.g. to write php scripts, we figured out that we would be constantly be reinventing the wheel and doing web-development like it was done a decade ago. Thus, we started looking at different web frameworks, which would make a lot of standardized tasks such as user login easy. We then decided to use Django, a Python framework, mainly because of the language. Some of us already knew Python, it is in general a language that is very easy to pick up and the Biopython project is pretty comprehensive. Additionally, a previously very successful iGEM Project (Gibthon) also used Django. Compared to most other choices (except Ruby on Rails, which has the disadvantage of being written in Ruby) it also seemed to be the most mature choice. We also thought of using a Perl or a Haskell framework, such as Yesod, but some team members disliked those languages (Haskellers disliked Perl and vice versa; the fact that the first Perl6 compiler was written in Haskell could not convince the Perl people either).

We then started reading the Django tutorials and the (great!) documentation and started porting our previous MySQL database designs to Django models. This was made a lot easier by an automated Django utility which converts a database into a draft models file, which we could then adapt to our needs. The rest of the team was impressed after seeing the admin site, which again was very easy to get up and running with Django. This week our official lab-youtube-song was this one.