I’ve not posted to this blog in over a month, mainly because I have been busy. Busy is a good thing I think. I have been helping clearwired get their newest web application off the ground, working on a number of screencasts, helping Mark with the latest batches of TG2 releases, learning about new and interesting OSS Python projects.

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.