Re: Q? Packaging app best practices (lots of questions)

On Thursday 09 March 2017 14:07:45 Charles Thayer wrote:

 

> * Examples: is there a canonical example app that covers enough ground

> to be _the_ "best practices" example?

 

An "app" is a very loosely defined term. There has been work to come to a "reusable app standard". But since there's no certification, stickers, prestige, increased revenue or princess in a tower incentive - in practice a good ammount of developers don't know about it let alone adhere to it.

So, there's not really a solid standard to reference your "best practices" against.

 

> * Examples templates: I include a eg_urls.py and

> templates/eg/index.html so that people could bring it up and try it

> out under a standalone test project. Is there a common way to do

> this?

 

If I have to download an example project for an app, the documentation is lacking. If I want to see if it does it's job, I prefer a working demo (and my goal is then to see if I can break it).

 

> * Ajax: Turns out that I only ever implemented ajax methods in this

> app, and they're all in views.py. I see other projects sometimes use

> ajax.py or api.py, would that be better?

 

Ajax.py is common, but in itself has no benefit. Api.py is a bad choice. It's used by some apps for providing the API for the app.

 

> * Implementation: For the app, I wanted to be able to like / bookmark

> any object in the system. Some folks use an abstract model mixin

> which creates a new table for every model that needs "like" support.

> I just create a single UserLink Model with a generic foreign field

> (and ContentType) instead. Is there a best practice around this?

 

Yes, the contenttype approach. Apps who alter the database schema at runtime should be shot.

 

> * Dependencies: I have a small amount of JS which depends on JQuery,

> animateCss, and Font Awesome. Is there a standard way to express

> these dependencies or should this be somehow simplified / ripped

> out.

 

Whatever you do, do not auto-inject JQuery. Use two settings instead:

- include_jquery: boolean

- jquery_url: string

 

Example: Django Bootstrap3. I also like the dictionary approach to settings (another example of that: Django CKEditor ).

 

You could use Django FontAwesome as a requirement and let it handle the icons. Projects already using it, will appreciate it.

 

> * JS.html: I have some templates which generate javascript which

> include some {% url %} lookups. Is this acceptable, or is generated

> js from templates a bad idea.

 

It's fine. It's how you handle breakage that matters. One of the most annoying things about reusable apps is that quite a few don't namespace their lookups. So in a project I cannot re-namespace them to resolve conflicts.

 

> * Using apps: I found the workflow quite painful because I'm putting

> the app in github but my project is actually in a different repo

> (public vs private). To manage this I have 3 directories --is there

> a better way?

 

Yes, git submodules.

 

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Melvyn Sopacua