Based on an actual, real-world application, Django has been gaining popularity as one of the more developer-friendly Web frameworks. Based on Python, Django comes complete with an object-relational mapping framework, a template engine, a complete Web controller infrastructure, as well as an automated administration interface. It provides features such as friendly URLs, support for Unicode, and the ability to plug into caching middleware, such as memcached.

Django core developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes that the 1.0 release is a culmination of a great deal of community input:

About half of the code that’s gone into Django over the past three years has been contributed by someone other than a core committer. Since our last stable release, we’ve made over 4,000 code commits, fixed more than 2,000 bugs, and edited, added, or removed around 350,000 lines of code. We’ve also added 40,000 lines of new documentation, and greatly improved what was already there.

Django 1.0 represents a the largest milestone in Django’s development to date: a web framework that a group of perfectionists can truly be proud of. Without this amazing community, though, it would have never happened.

New features in Django 1.0 include:

An improved ORM framework:
Django’s object-relational mapper – the component which provides the mapping between Django model classes and your database, and which mediates your database queries – has been dramatically improved by a massive refactoring. For most users of Django this is backwards-compatible; the public-facing API for database querying underwent a few minor changes, but most of the updates took place in the ORM’s internals...

Improved Unicode handling
Django’s internals have been refactored to use Unicode throughout; this drastically simplifies the task of dealing with non-Western-European content and data in Django. Additionally, utility functions have been provided to ease interoperability with third-party libraries and systems which may or may not handle Unicode gracefully.

Re-factored admin application
The Django administrative interface ... has been completely refactored; admin definitions are now completely decoupled from model definitions (no more class Admin declaration in models!), rewritten to use Django’s new form-handling library ... and redesigned with extensibility and customization in mind.

Automatic escaping of template variables
To provide improved security against cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, Django’s template system now automatically escapes the output of variables. This behavior is configurable, and allows both variables and larger template constructs to be marked as safe ... or unsafe..

django.contrib.gis (GeoDjango) A project over a year in the making, this adds world-class GIS (Geographic Information Systems) support to Django, in the form of a contrib application. Its documentation is currently being maintained externally

Pluggable file storage Django’s built-in FileField and ImageField now can take advantage of pluggable file-storage backends, allowing extensive customization of where and how uploaded files get stored by Django.

In addition, Django 1.0 was refactored to be compatible with the latest version of Jython, the Java-based Python implementation:

Django’s codebase has been refactored to remove incompatibilities with Jython, an implementation of Python written in Java, which runs Python code on the Java Virtual Machine. Django is now compatible with the forthcoming Jython 2.5 release.

What do you think of Django 1.0?