The next major version of Django is now available in beta. The new release adds support for functional unique constraints, has a new more secure password hasher, and uses more Python standard libraries.

Django is a high-level Python Web framework for creating full stack dynamic websites. Django takes care of user authentication, content administration, site maps and RSS feeds to make website development easier.

The new release has a new expressions positional argument for UniqueConstraint(), meaning developers can create functional unique constraints on expressions and database functions. A unique constraint is usually set up on a database or SQL query as a column constraint to ensure unique values in the column, and to prevent duplicate values from appearing in the column. Constraints are usually enforced by the SQL database engine. In Postgresql, developers can create a functional unique index with 'Lower' and it will work as a case insensitive unique constraint. The new support makes it possible to pass this from Django.

The next improvement in the new release is a new password hasher. The scrypt password hasher is more secure and recommended over PBKDF2. Like PBKDF2, scrypt uses a set number of iterations to slow down brute-force attacks, but is designed to use more memory compared to other password-based key derivation functions to limit the amount of parallelism an attacker can use. This reduces the option for attackers with sufficient resources to launch large-scale parallel attacks to speed up the attacking process.

Another improvement is that the Python standard library’s zoneinfo is now the default timezone implementation in Django.

The developers say that the beta is feature complete, and only bugs in the new features and regressions from earlier versions of Django will be fixed between now and 4.0 final. The current release schedule calls for a release candidate in a month from now with the final release to follow about two weeks after that around December 6.

Django 4.0 supports Python 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10. The Django 3.2.x series is the last to support Python 3.6 and 3.7. Django 4 beta can be downloaded from the Django project's download page.

More Information

Django Project Website

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