[Ironpython-users] Django & IronPython - Not working

[Vernon D. Cole]

>
> User PlexCUser has proposed the issue:
>
> "Hello,
>
> The basic Django example (manage.py) fails to execute in IronPython.
>
> Dajngo - 1.6.1
> IronPython - 2.7
> Visual Studio Ultimate with SP1- 2013 - 2.0 (Django Integration - 2.0)
>
[...clipped...]

I have been aiming at this target literally for years, and the time is
indeed almost here, but it will be a while yet before the result would be
production ready.  (Another volunteer on the project would help motivate
me.)

I never expected django to run on IronPython 2 because of the historically
confused use of bytes vs strings in django.  Recently, they have had to
clean django up in order to run it on Python 3, and my plan all along has
been to wait until IronPython 3 to actually try it.  With that in mind, I
have cloned a copy of the IronPython3 source, but have not yet got it to
build using Visual Studio Express.  I may have to get serious and license a
real version of Visual Studio.  [side question: which version of VS is
recommended?]

The next hurdle for the project is a suitable database back-end for the
django ORM.  The Sqlite3 back-end should work straight out of the box --
but Sqlite is not suitable for production operation.  The other officially
supported database engines all use driver code written in C, so are
non-starters for IronPython.

This leaves (as far as I know) only the django-mssql package as a viable
backend. That package uses a fork of an early version of adodbapi as its
database api layer -- a very old fork with neither IronPython nor Python3
capability.  I entered into a project with Michael Manfre (the maintainer
of django-mssql) to replace that old fork with the current
sourceforge/adodbapi <http://sourceforge.net/projects/adodbapi> and vastly
refactored adodbapi for that purpose.  That work is in
https://bitbucket.org/vernondcole/django-mssql-ado-merge and is complete
enough that it is being used here at eHealth Africa in a lightweight role
(where a Linux django server modifies a SQL Server database.)

Unfortunately, Michael has decided to abandon that effort and will maintain
his separate fork of adodbapi. His efforts are dedicated to improving the
commercial environment he works in: CPython2.7, Windows, and SQL Server.
He felt that my efforts to widen the choices (Python3, IronPython, Linux,
other database engines) would impact his ability to support his target
system. Therefore, the "merge" fork is (as of this morning) 93 commits
behind his work.  I included several of his changes in the adodbapi version
I released last week, but the rest still need to be evaluated and manually
merged. Having to maintain a separate fork of the django database back-end
will slow me down, I fear.

Nevertheless, I hope to have an alpha-test version of django on IronPython
running in a few weeks.
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