Posts Tagged ‘pycon’

Pycon 2010 Dump… Sorta

Monday, March 1st, 2010

I decided this year I am going to forego my Pycon dump, and focus on the news that matters most to my readership.  There are plenty of reviews of talks, and I went to a bunch of good ones, had a great time at wsgi house, blah, blah, blah.  What _you_ probably care about is what’s cutting edge in TurboGears, and the sprints are where it’s at.

We had 12 sprinters on day 1, I think 10 on day 2 and then 8, 4.  So yeah, there’s some manpower behind the next-gen TG stuff.  And that was our focus.  I don’t think anyone lifted a 2.0 finger, all the effort has gone into 2.1.  With Luke Macken’s help, we closed 21 tickets.  I think we have all the road-blocks out of the way for the forthcoming b2 release, which will likely be the last beta before release candidates.  The api is pretty solid now, I don’t expect to expand it an more, so it’s going to be feature frozen in b2.  There are only 2 blocker tickets before 2.1rc1.

Mark Ramm and Jenny Steele overhauled the visual components of the 2.1 docs and came up with a better way of updating our public face.  Jenny has also put forth an effort in c5t (a new cms based on mongo and tg2) to improve our image library capabilities.  She also spent some time updating the TG admin so it looks way better now.  I’ll post some screenshots when I do the 2.1b2 release.

C5t got quite a bit of love actually.  Rick Copeland added Ming 0.2 support since the api changed a bit from 0.1. Christopher Brown fixed a bunch of the styling.  Kevin Mitchell added some tests.  Jason Galyon worked on per-page authz, and Jorge Vargas worked on the editor implementation.  I created a new c5t.website project so that we can work on the core and the public image independently.  This is valuable especially since c5t does not ship with TW1, but we wanted to add mongodb support to the admin on the website, and TW1 is required for Sprox to do it’s magic in the admin presently.

Kai Groner and Eric J (sorry I don’t know your last name) both made some contributions to Sprox.  Eric added Ming support after I refactored the database orm later organization in Sprox.  Ming is a layer on top of pymongo that allows you to enforce schemata in your collections.  This is perfect for selecting validators (the validator in the schema becomes Sprox’s schema), and fairly simple to select widgets with.  Eric had every provider test that works with SAORM working, except for one that looks like a pymongo bug on the limit operator.  Kai worked on handling inline-forms in Sprox.  Looks like most of the provider code is working, we just need to add in tw.dynforms in an intelligent way to hook the rest of the application up.  While this is not a trivial task, it looks as if we are about half-way there for supporting inline forms. All of this work will go into sprox 0.7.

I also spent some time with Sprox, and added jquery support, but it’s not ready for release.  At the end of the sprints I had a working jquery table with pagination in the TG Admin, but some polish is going to be required to get that fully working.  When I’m done, you will be able to easily swap between nothing, dojo, and jquery, and mootools support, or mix and match at any level.  You can also switch between mongo, or any rdbms SA supports, and hopefully couchdb soon.  It’s kinda scary that’s true.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Pycon 2009 Recap

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

It felt like this year Pycon was executed to near perfection. Many struggles I had with last years Pycon were addressed both by the organizers, and some creative thinking.
In this post I will recap everything that happened from my perspective.

WSGI House

I gathered a few close friends from the TG team and a couple of wildcards for perspective to share a house for the continuum of the conference.  Having a house gave us a place to go home to at night and meet with friends, often staying up late talking about issues surrounding our favorite software.  Having a focused group I feel is important because you spend less time off on wild tangents.  The first (and pretty much only) rule of the house was that you pay the same amount whether you stay one night or nine.  At least one of our members was encouraged by this rule to stay for the sprints which he hadn’t done before. Success!

Tutorials

For me, tutorials got off to a shaky start, but we seemed to recover nicely.  TurboGears has a lot of momentum right now, and it makes it hard to come up with a succinct tutorial when there is so much functionality to cover.  I think we were able to recover and that our students managed to soak in enough knowledge from our proverbial fire hose to create some useful applications.  I think we have a good start on a new book.

I was extremely impressed with the quality of students who were attending my ToscaWidgets tutorial.  Every single student finished every example.  I chose Pylons to give the tutorial, and although it is a little harder to integrate TW in the stream than does TurboGears2, it installed quickly and flawlessly.  Overall, I think the tutorial was a success.

Talks

This year I did not focus on attending the talks, but instead chose wisely based on speaker and topic and allowed my feet to do the walking if the talk became uninteresting.  I definitely missed some talks, but the AV team has done an incredible job putting the talks up on blip.tv so that I can review them later.

This year I did not miss Raymond Hettinger’s talk on AI in python and was enthralled by a speaker who could successfully put a page of code on the screen and keep my interest.  I showed up to support Philip Jenvey in his talk on Pylons on Jython but was impressed by his ability to provide a succinct example on where Jython really shines.  I am hoping that more people take a second look at this really well done presentation.

Now, I am a SQLAlchemy supporter through and through, but find the domain of database mapping an interesting echosystem.  While the ORM panel was littered by advertising chatter from one of the panelists who did not even write an ORM, an obvious dis-inclusion was Robert Brewer who wrote Dejavu, a very nice way to map persistent resources of different types for use in an “objecty” way.  Bob’s talk was especially interesting and makes me wonder if SQLAlchemy could leverage some of the work with AST that Bob beautifully displayed with some of the most amazing one-handed keyboarding I have ever seen.

Open Space

Well, I said I was going to give a talk at the Open Space, and ended up not doing so.  Part of the problem was the utter lack of projectors in the OS rooms, and part of it was a reluctance to break up the collaborative/discussive vibe that was going on in these sessions.  WSGIers hammered out a 2.0 spec, which involved a discussion I only monitored in passing.  I was disappointed by the lack of people who showed up for the GSoC BOF, but I think the economy held back a lot of students from attending Pycon.  It was also nice to allow my feet to walk around and see what was up in different projects.  I met one guy who took REST way to far and got to express some of my dissatisfaction with one of the available tools.  On a more positive note, the TG BOF was well-attended  and it was nice to see so many users wondering what was up in TG land.

Sprints

This year I refused to let the noobs get me down and actually wrote some code.  I am sorry if I did not act as a good host of the TG project, but we have some important milestones coming up and I just wanted to get work done on that.  Sprinting remains a cornerstone of our development process and I will see if we can’t get our monthly
sprints happening again in 2009.  I was however able to completely re-engineer our dispatch system, and while it is not currently 100% complete, it should be finished in a matter of days.  RestController now supports variable arguments for get_one, delete, and put, as well as supporting lookup and default.  Anyone can actually now create their own dispatch mechanism, since this functionality has been generalized.  Simply subclass Dispatcher, override _dispatch() and go to town.  I look forward
to seeing what kind of crazy code this brings to TG land.  A lot of discussion has been had on how to make “plugins” or “extensions” for TG, and you can rest assured that we will have this functionality soon.

Thanks

Thanks to all of my house mates who put up with my “mothering”.  Thanks to all of you who tolerated my “um”s at my talk on Sphinx, and especially to Georg Brandl who answered some questions.  Thanks to the organizers, volunteers and staff that came together to create what has been my best Pycon to date.

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Posted in Python, Sprint, Turbogears, Uncategorized, pycon | 1 Comment »

Pycon 2009

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

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!

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Posted in Agile, Python, SQLAlchemy, Software, Sprint, Sprox, Testing, Turbogears, grok, nose, nosetests, pycon | 4 Comments »

TurboGears and Google Summer of Code

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

TurboGears is undergoing a monumental effort to participate in GSoC.  Ok, maybe not monumental, but at least 5 of the developers have been hard at working putting together an application even Google wouldn’t turn down. Even if we are not accepted, we are planning on participating by way of PSF, as we have done in previous Google Highly Open Participation contests.  We have developed a number of ideas which students can choose from, or students are welcome to come up with their own TurboGears ideas, and I am sure that one of our mentors will be able to match up with you.      

My own ideas revolve around DBSprockets and TwTools, which is not surprising since I am the owner of said projects.  The largest project and the one which I have the most desire to see put into action is that of a TurboGears CMS.  There had been some work done last year by the guys at Pagoda which produced a brilliant screencast, but the project seems stalled out and it would be nice to see it revived.  Furthermore, the solution I proposed is intended to be much more modular, so you could pick apart portions of the CMS and put them in your existing applications.  I think this would be the most flexible solution, and also one which would employ much that DBSprockets, TwTools, and Toscawidgets have to offer.  If you are a student who is interested in working on this project, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.  You can also track me down at Pycon for the remainder of the week, and at the TurboGears sprint next week.  If you are a student who is eager to get started feel free to participate in our sprint, remotely or in person.   

One of the great things I see coming from this mini-project is that we now have a very nice set of concrete ideas about how to make TurboGears better.  Whether or not students participate in the development we still get a huge benefit from the creation of ideas, and it gives the development team and possibly new developers a target to make TurboGears the best it can be.  My hope is that these ideas will not only bring a students to our project, but also bring some developers out of the woodwork who may have started similar projects and would like to contribute.  The bottom line is, if you aren’t a contributor, and want to be, here is a great place to start.

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Posted in DBSprockets, Python, Turbogears, TwTools | No Comments »

Pycon08 Registration is open!

Monday, January 21st, 2008

I’m very excited to attend this year’s Pycon . In past years, pycon has been a place for me to learn about the multitude of open-source products that are available, and see how to use them. Turbogears, Twisted, even Iterators were topics that I tackled during previous visits to Pycon. I am certain that this year will be no different.

This year, my third time attending the conference I was unable to find a tutorial that spiked my interest, so I decided to help Mark Ramm and Ben Bangert on their tutorial on both TG2 and Pylons, which I have been participating in the development of. Mark told me that DBSprockets is going to be showcased as a competitor to Django’s newforms. I definitely don’t want to miss that. Mark and Ben are both very knowledgeable about Pylons and TG, and their tutorial should be an excellent way to learn how to use these cutting edge technologies.

I have found that one of the best ways to learn new things is to sprint with other developers. I will be sprinting on TG for this year’s Pycon, and I encourage anyone who has not sprinted before to join a sprint for the topic of their choice. You will learn more than any tutorial or talk can teach you, and best of all you get to contribute.

So, hopefully I’ll see you there. Drop me a line if you are looking for a climbing partner at the conference, I usually try to start up a birds of a feather for those who are vertically addicted.

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Posted in DBSprockets, Python, Turbogears | No Comments »