In December 2008, while working for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, my team began to use Django and Pinax. We needed to make all the forms in Pinax Section 508 compatible, and the thought of going through all of 30+ forms and rewriting {{ form }} as a block of {% for field in form %} with all the template logic seemed like way too much work.
So with the encouragement of Katie Cunningham, James Tauber and Jannis Leidel I took the Django docs on forms and combined it with Dragan Babic’s excellent Uni-Form css/javascript library and created the ubiquitous as_uni_form filter. After that, fixing all the forms in Pinax to be section 508 compliant was trivial.
Not long before PyCon 2009 James Tauber suggested the {% uni_form form helper %} API, where one could trivially create forms without writing any HTML.
At PyCon 2009 Jannis Leidel helped me through releasing the 0.3 release of django-uni-form on PyPI. It was also at that PyCon that I believe I switched the library from Google Project Hosting to Github.
Performance in form rendering is normally a nigh moot issue in Django, because the majority of speed issues are fixable via appropriate use of Django’s cache engine. Templates and especially form rendering are usually the last things to worry about when you try to increase performance.
However, because we do care about producing lean and fast code, work is being done to speed up and measure performance of this library. These are the average times of rendering 1000 forms with the latest django-uni-form code in Dell Latitude E6500 Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.53GHz:
| Method | Time without template caching | Time with template caching |
|---|---|---|
| Plain Django | 0.921598911285 sec | 0.915469169617 sec |
| Django-uni-form |as_uni_form filter | 4.37760996819 sec | 4.23220916295 sec |
| Django-uni-form {% uni_form %} tag | 5.63008499146 sec | 4.53284406662 sec |
Version 0.9.0 added an important performance boost that makes times with and without caching very close to each other.
Versions supported include Python 2.5.4, 2.6.x, and 2.7.x. If you need greater backwards compatibility django-uni-form 0.7.0 supports Python 2.4.x.
Versions supported include Django 1.2.x and Django 1.3.x. If you need greater backwards compatibility django-uni-form 0.7.0 supports Django 1.1.x.