Postgresql

Deployment is usually a tedious process with lots of tinkering until everything is setup just right. We deploy quite a few Django sites on a regular basis here at Caktus and still do tinkering, but we've attempted to functionalize some of the core tasks to ease the process. I've put together a basic example that outlines local and remote environment setup. This is a simplified example and just one of many ways to deploy a Django project (I learned a lot from Jacob Kaplan-Moss' django-deployment-workshop), so I encourage you to browse around the Django community to learn more. The entire source for this example project can be found in the caktus-deployment Bitbucket repository.

If you've ever tried to increase the shared_buffers setting in your postgresql.conf to a value that exceeds the amount of shared memory supported by your operating system kernel, then you'll see an error message like this:

By default, Django doesn't do explicit table locking. This is OK for most read-heavy scenarios, but sometimes you need guaranteed, exclusive access to the data. Caktus uses PostgreSQL in most of our production environments, so we can use the various lock modes it provides to control concurrent access to the data. Once we obtain a lock in PostgreSQL, it is held for the remainder of the current transaction. Django provides transaction management, so all we need to do is execute a SQL LOCK statement within a transaction, and Django and PostgreSQL will handle the rest.

Here at Caktus, we use the popular Django web framework for a lot of our custom web application development. We don't use Django simply because it's popular, easy to learn, or happened to be the first thing we found. We've written web apps in PHP, Java, and Ruby on Rails--all before we discovered Django--but were never quite satisfied. Following are just a few of the reasons that we both enjoy working with Django and believe it gives you (the client) the best end-product.

Caktus released minibooks (open-sourced under the AGPL) as a bookkeeping package for small tech agencies. Boasting a double-entry accounting system, customer relationship management (CRM) and transaction reconciliation, minibooks provides a clean, multiuser web-based interface to manage simple accounting needs for small businesses.

Tobias already mentioned how Caktus uses Asterisk as our PBX. He also mentioned how we tested various frontends both for managing the asterisk configuration and interacting with asterisk to, for example, check our voicemail. We were inticed by some of the client management solutions that we could plumb up with asterisk. Caktus has a loose administration structure, which allows us to be flexible and not have levels of managers between clients and coders. But, this flexiblility can leave loose ends unchecked when the person in charge of a project is distracted for a day or two. We saw this as an opportunity where Caktus could add a level of group accountability and use some neat technology. We also wanted a tool that would integrate well with our current homegrown DjangoERP/CRM as well as Trac, our prefered tool for project management. So, we decided to write some sweet code.

One problem with marketing is that it introduces pseudo-false concepts, arbitrarily divorces necessarily wed ones, and leaves out all the gory details. We recently had a client ask us,