Histroy of Python Django

Django grew organically from real-world applications written by a Web development team in Lawrence,
Kansas. It was born in the fall of 2003, when the Web programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World
newspaper, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, began using Python to build applications. The World
Online team, responsible for the production and maintenance of several local news sites, thrived in a
development environment dictated by journalism deadlines. For the sites — including LJWorld.com,
Lawrence.com, and KUsports.com — journalists (and management) demanded that features be added and
entire applications be built on an intensely fast schedule, often with only days’ or hours’ notice. Thus, Adrian
and Simon developed a time-saving Web development framework out of necessity — it was the only way
they could build maintainable applications under the extreme deadlines.
In summer 2005, after having developed this framework to a point where it was efficiently powering most of
World Online’s sites, the World Online team, which now included Jacob Kaplan-Moss, decided to release the
framework as open source software. They released it in July 2005 and named it Django, after the jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt.
Although Django is now an open source project with contributors across the planet, the original World Online
developers still provide central guidance for the framework’s growth, and World Online contributes other
important aspects such as employee time, marketing materials, and hosting/bandwidth for the framework’s
Web site (http://www.djangoproject.com/).