After using Zope3/Grok for a little, I wondered how hard it would be to implement views as classes in Django, in a similar vain to how it's done in Grok. I came up with something rather simple but effective. It may be more appropriate if you use a template engine other than Django Templates, which allows you to call functions with arguments, but it's still useful none-the-less to encapsulate functions in a class.
You could, for example, extend View to be JinjaView, just replacing render_template().
A nice extension, I imagine, would be to automatically figure out the template name as well as the path prefix for it (since you probably want it to be found under packagename/templatename.html).
A number of people have kindly posted snippets on how to use pdb/ipdb with django. However, this only works when running the django development server.
I thought it would be nice to have a trace() command that would turn into a no-op when the development server is not running, so you wouldn't have to worry about leaving trace() commands in your code if you want to quickly test with mod_wsgi or mod_python.
The code above attempts (on Posix-like systems) to determine if the development server is running (by quickly checking if "manage.py runserver" is in the process list), and sets a DJANGO_SERVER setting appropriately. Then when you import the trace() method, it is defined as set_trace() if DJANGO_SERVER is True, or a no-op if DJANGO_SERVER is False.
When you hit the trace() in pdb/ipdb, enter "u" to go up to the calling trace() statement.