Developer guide: Libraries and frameworks

Core

• Django is a web framework with an ORM and a form generator.
• Django REST framework is the library behind the Cyder REST API.

Web

Serverside

• Sass compiles Sass source files into CSS. Sass has some handy features that CSS doesn't.
• Jinja2 compiles Jinja2 templates into HTML. Features of the Jinja2 template language include HTML escaping, macros, Python object attribute access, and an extensible collection of text filters.
• Jingo is a bridge between Django and Jinja2.
• jingo-minify primarily serves to minify CSS and JS. It also invokes Sass for us. A more informative description would be useful.

Clientside

• jQuery is a JS library that simplifies common tasks and provides lots of polyfills.
• EditableGrid makes HTML tables editable.

Database

• South is a database migration library. It can automatically generate bi-directional schema migration scripts and allows us to move forward and backward in Cyder's schema history. (Data migrations are also supported but we don't use them very much.)

Development

• nose is a test framework for Python. It provides test discovery and a few other things. (As far as I know, we don't use any nose features that aren't supported by something in the CPython standard library.)
• django-nose provides Django integration for nose.