This site is built using Django, a powerful, high-level Python Web framework.
We were looking for a web development framework to simplify the programming of this web site, and the handling of the database on which it depends. Since we already use Python for many programming tasks, we decided on Django, and it has made life much easier for us!
Django powers the site search, the news system, including the summary on the home-page side bar and the RSS feed, and the authentication needed to access the customer-only support pages. In fact, with only a few exceptions all of the pages on the site are served dynamically using Django.
Optimisations
So why are there exceptions? It is simply a matter of optimising the response time, especially when the server is busy. We decided to reduce the time taken to deliver the most important pages, especially the home page, by serving them from files, rather than by invoking Django. However, even these pages are generated by Django initially: we simply save the results in files so that the server can find the data more quickly.
