In a project I am in need of a web-based tool to maintain master data in a Firebird database. Being pretty bad in writing web-based applications, I thought I will try a so-called CRUD (create/read/update/delete) web-framework, because I don't need anything fancy (yet), just to edit data in a few tables including user-friendly support for maintaining foreign-key relationships via drop-down boxes and such.

Although not being a Python Geek, I gave Django a try, and I must admit, I'm impressed on how fast one can build a simple web-based master data management application with it. It's pretty much defining an Django object model, which represents the tables, fields and relationships in your database. By enabling Django's auto-generated admin site/area based on this model, this is all you need to access, delete, insert and update data in your database.

The Django project does not officially support Firebird out-of-the box, but there is a Firebird Python driver and a small Django-Firebird backend project hosted here.

Django allows to integrate with legacy databases by reverse-engineering - in Django slang 'inspect' - a physical data model into Django's object model. The inspect functionality had a few bugs in the initial Django-Firebird backend. The good news are, I have fixed them and committed the changes into the SVN repository.

Possibly, I will write a bit about setting up Django with Firebird in a forthcoming blog item.

Thomas