We hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe from the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of its effect on large gatherings, PyCon 2020 was cancelled changed to an online event. Although not being able to gather in person was disheartening for organizers, speakers, and attendees, the Python community shared virtual high-fives and hugs with PyCon US 2020 Online. We recorded our planned Heroku workshop for the event, on which this blog post is based.

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

When Django was created, over ten years ago, the web was a less complicated place. The majority of web pages were static. Database-backed, Model/View/Controller-style web apps were the new spiffy thing. Ajax was barely starting to be used, and only in narrow contexts.

The web circa 2016 is significantly more powerful. The last few years have seen the rise of the so-called “real-time” web: apps with much higher interaction between clients and servers and...

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9. This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed PostgreSQL Back-end

Django's fantastic built-in Postgres database back-end received a nice name change. Previously known as django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2, the back-end will now be officially available as the much easier...

Heroku Connect is written primarily in Python using Django. It's an add-on and a platform app, meaning it's built on the Heroku platform. Part of our interface provides users with a realtime dashboard, so we decided to take advantage of socket.io and node.js for websocket communication. But like all Heroku apps, only one type of dyno can serve traffic. This left us with two choices: manage 2 apps, each with its own repo, and carefully consider when and how we deployed them, or find a way to serve both node and Django traffic from the same app.