So, Pycon registration has been up for a few days, I will be speaking both on and off-podium (read: open space) and providing assistance to and presenting tutorials.  Here is a run down of what I am planning in case you wanted a little bit more in-depth information.

Tutorials:

Turbogears2 Beginner and Intermediate:

I will be assisting Mark Ramm by giving individuals help installing and using the new TurboGears2 framework.  Mark is an experienced tutorial presenter, an expert in the technology, and in general a fun character to spend a few hours with.  When you leave his tutorials you should expect to have a working version of TG2 on your machine, along with an understanding of Model, View, and Controller paradigms.  Middleware, Forms, and REST will also be covered.  One note, if you are getting started with TG2, it’s best to have it installed and running if you plan to attend only the Intermediate Section.  We will not be going over installation in the second-half.

 Toscawidgets: Test Driven Modular Ajax:

I am presenting this tutorial which will describe how to use the valuable Toscawidgets package to create web content.  If you are currently use WSGI technology, and are interested in creating reusable, modular web content, this is a perfect way to get started.  I will show you how to configure TW middleware to work with pylons (which is applicable to other frameworks like repoze.bfg, paste, or even plone/Grok).  I will then describe how you might use this middleware to generate web forms.  The last few hours of class will be devoted to using the JavaScript utilities of TW to create an Ajaxified website, and test it using YUITest.

The Big F’ing Tutorial: Development Using the repoze.bfg Web Framework

I will assist/present with Chris McDonough about this up-and-coming framework who’s goals are to utilize bits of the zope 3 framework, wsgi, and new technologies to make a lighting-fast web server.  Those of you who are familiar with Zope technologies may be interested to find how nicely some of the familiar bits of zope are integrated with wsgi with repoze.bfg.

 Presentations:

Using Sphinx and Doctests to provide Robust Documentation

This is a 1/2 hour slot which describes how you can integrate tested documentation with your source code… with sanity!  I go over a quick install of Sphinx, and use some screencasts to demenstrate how to add, run, and display doctests using it.

Open Space:Agile Development with SQLAlchemy and Python Testing Tools

I really enjoy giving this talk, and even though it was not accepted as a formal talk, I will find a venue by way of Open Space to express my knowledge of Testing, SA, and Nose.  I have given this talk a few times now, and it’s fairly polished.  My presentation, while on some dry topics, won’t put you to sleep.  Carefully prepared screencasts and photograph-punctuated slides makes the 45 minutes breeze by.  Questioneers/Hecklers welcome!

 Sprint Topics

I want to spend some time with the Dispatch of TG2, and probably push Sprox further a bit.  If you are just starting with TG, please feel free to contribute.  Sprinting is a great way to learn a lot from the experts in the domain.  We usually do a meet-greet-install the night before the sprints.  Oh, and I’ve been known to provide refreshments to all of our sprinting hordes (read: FREE BEER).

So, I hope to see all of you there!  If you see me in the hall, feel free to introduce yourself and tell me what you are using Python for!

One of the more interesting things I have started to use with some frequency is Sphinx. Sphinx is a documentation system whichallows you to create webpages (among other things) with .rst files. It also grabs directly from your modules and inserts your docstrings (including your doctests.) It is great to have code which is not only documented, but also tested using nose. Look for a screencast from me in the near future on this one.

Two of the recent screencasts I have written show how to use virtualenv, PasteScript, and Nose. I go through a ground-up example showing how to create a virtualenv, a project package, and finally how to test that package and provide robustness with code coverage. The final screencast is about how to install TG2, which has become much easier in the advent of TG2’s first alpha release.

TG2 is actually nearing it’s second alpha release. I think This is the best release yet. I spent some time moving DBSprockets to pep-8 compliance, and the two things TG2 depends on (tg.ext.silverplate and tgcrud) are now both using the newest release of DBSprockets. I also released basketweaver which allows you to create a simple local pypi made of static HTML files. Special thanks to Chris McDonough, who wrote the makeindex.py script. All I did was to fixed it up a little, and package using PasteScript, and provide a console_script for easy usage.

Along with Sphinx, I have been trying to wrap my head around Rum, which is a new project to generate forms from database schema, much like DBSprockets. Although the internals of the system are somewhat mystifying, the API is squeaky clean, and in my mind what DBSprockets was eventually planned to be. The great news is that Alberto has done such a good job laying the groundwork for Rum I should be able to jump right in and apply lessons learned from DBSprockets. At this point it is safe to say that I will continue to maintain DBSprockets for bug fixes, but that the internals of it are going to be converted over to using Rum, before being deprecated altogether. DBSprockets had a great run, but it is time to move on and move forward with a superior design which promises to integrate so many WSGI technologies.