How to Evaluate Applications

Here are some questions you can ask of a prospective application or project that you’ve found.

• Is it alive? When were the most recent feature updates or bug fixes? Not every project needs to be updated every week, but a project that last saw activity in a flurry of commits a year ago could have been abandoned. Anything developed against a pre-1.0 release of Django needs to be kept up to date, or it quickly becomes useless.

• How’s the documentation? Is there documentation? Is it organized and readable? Is it relatively free of red-flag warnings such as “NOTE: This section is out of date!”? Does it seem to be actively maintained? (For example, is the documentation managed via source control and distributed as part of the project download?)

• Who are the authors? Google the author name(s) to get a sense of how experienced they are and how their work is regarded in the community. If you come up with a lot of helpful replies on the project mailing list, for example, that’s good.

• How’s the code? If you have some experience as a Python programmer, one of the best ways to get a quick feel for a project is to download its source code and just start reading. Are the source files organized? Are there docstrings that explain the intent and use of functions and methods? Is there a test suite, and does it pass?

• Is there a community? Many Django projects that were started to fulfill a particular person’s or organization’s needs have grown to have user and development communities of their own. The more complex the application, the more likely that it has its own community of experienced people who can help you solve problems. Not every application needs a vibrant community to be considered viable, of course, but social infrastructure should be present in rough proportion to the complexity of the application.