Django was designed to make common Web-development tasks fast and easy. Django adheres to the DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) principle.

Django comes with an object-relational mapper in which you describe your database layout in Python code. Other useful features are a caching framework that integrates with memcached or other backends and a syndication framework that makes creating RSS and Atom feeds as easy as writing a small Python class.

Django has a rich documentation and great tutorials. An active community gives answers to common questions and hints to solve problems.

The Google App Engine provides a Python runtime environment including Django as a third-party library. I started yesterday evening to host a first Facebook application, designed with Python and Django,  on the Google App Server.

Django was originally developed at World Online, the Web department of a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. Django is now run by an international team of volunteers.

The main elements of the Django Template Language are :

• variables :  {{section.title}}   the content is replaced by the title attribute of the section object
• filters : {{name|ower}}   the content is replaced by the lowercase string of the name; there are about 30 built-in filters; custom template filters can be created
• tags :  {% doit %}  tags are more versatile than variables;  tags can be used for loops, conditions, …; there are about 24 built-in tags; custom template tags can be created
• comments :  {#my comment#}  only for single-line comments
• decorators : @my_decorator   – a decorator is a function that wraps the decorated function  in yet another function, allowing you to run code both before and after the main function
• template inheritance : {%block identifier%} …….. {%endblock%}   the content of the block named identifier in the base template can be overridden by the content specified in child templates