I read this and thought "hmm, I bet it's not *that* hard" ... ha ha ha. I spent a little while trying to see if I could mock up a comparable Django view using a Django model. I figured it should be possible using mock (my favorite mocking tool so far), and found mock-django on pypi which looks somewhat promising though totally undocumented.

I kicked the problem around for a while and decided I don't have enough time to figure out how to make it work without a database, so that's not encouraging :-p

Would love to see somebody else have a go at it.