We (the developers) are actually beginning to feel like it's one of the biggest Django sites on the interweb right now. Definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, but we're gaining users like mad and traffic is insane.
Disclaimer: I figure the OP's question is more directed at HN members rather than YC startups, but for the record we're not a YC startup
There are a LOT of Django sites out there with considerably more traffic and it misrepresents the size of the Django community to suggest that, "one of the biggest Django sites" is only serving a few hundred hits a day.
It does look like I was totally full of my own shit though, we're clearly not that big when it comes to the other Django sites out there.
http://alexa.com/siteinfo/schoolrack.com+ww.com
A tripling of your traffic in 30 days during the 'off' season is a pretty good showing in my book, as long as it wasn't when coming from '10' users to '30' users :)
should be "to seamlessly connect..." ?
Look at the first answer. It seems like there are bigger django websites out there.
Very nice, I congratulate you. You have found a niche, and your execution is top notch.
Why? I have being using PHP for almost 10 years, so it was a lot easier to switch to a PHP framework when I switched to an open source framework about 3 years ago. PHP is also easier to get on a shared hosting (maybe not anymore, but at the time I made my switch, it was a major concern).
Like : API, doc, large community.
Dislike : php syntax (->), no active record, PHP4 support (no real visibility control), deployment on windows/ISS is no easy task.
But future looks good as they plan to drop PHP4 quite soon with 1.3.
Some website we created using cake: http://www.themetropolitain.ca http://www.gogarneau.com
I hate "->".
EDIT: I should mention that CherryPy is at its heart. We love CherryPy. And our chat backend uses a secret sauce Python async framework that might or might not be open sourced very soon...
I'm assuming you meant "webapps".
Long answer: we used Django because that's what I knew best, but we're going to switch to Pylons because it's more flexible (being a so-called "glue framework") and has less dependency on a database (tried writing a custom authentication backend in Django without a database? Good luck).
So Django is great if you have a database; less so if you don't (I guess that's the whole "full stack" thing).
We see the robustness of the jvm as a lot more useful at the latter- and scala seems like a good fit (better than java itself, or ruby for that matter) for the kind of datamining we're going to do. Granted, C would likely be much faster, but the ability to include third party java packages and the amount of boilerplate needed for C turned us off to that. Add in a good web framework like Lift, and we don't see the need to fracture our server-side apps into many different languages.
DNS server is implemented in Twisted (but is not derived from twisted.names) and web site is Django+nginx. Database is Postgres.
