Posts Tagged ‘Sprint’

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.

TurboGears Black Friday Sprint

Friday, November 13th, 2009

If you are from the US, you may be familiar with the custom of racing to your local commercialization hub before the sun rises and beating your fellow man over the head to get that cute little fifi doll your daughter wants for christmas.  This endeavor is often fueled by the previous day’s binge on tryptophan-laced poultry.

black_friday

TurboGears wants you to know there _is_ an alternative to this ruckus behavior.  While it may not offer a method of transference of the latest flu virus strain, you may come hang out with the leaders of our community on irc://#turbogears@irc.freenode.net . and ask questions and help your fellow man.  In the spirit of thanksgiving, you may decide it would be good to return the 1000s of lines of code contributed by helping us document that mess*!

November 27, 2009 starting around 9am MST, ending when Chris passes out, we will convene and work on the 134 todo items left in our documentation.  If some of you are near Denver/Boulder that day, I would be happy to organize an on-site meetup, please let me know.  So, the day after thanksgiving, why not act gluttonous for one more day (with your writing) and lets see if we cant close another 60 todo Items as we did on the last doc push.  Be you an advanced super 37173 user, or someone completely new to TG, we have got something for you to do!  Lets work together to make the formal 2.1 release of TG the best yet, with the highest level of completed documentation evar!

cheers.

-chris

* the term “mess” is not used literally in this sense.

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!

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.

Turbogears Worldwide Sprint

Monday, February 4th, 2008

The last TG2 sprint was seen as a resounding success, despite the fact that coordinating such an event is quite a challenge.

On February 23rd Mark Ramm will be visiting Colorado and plans on coordinating yet another sprint. I will probably still be working on dbsprockets which is likely to be a very important component of the new framework. If you are a python developer who is interested in Turbogears and would like to contribute, don’t hesitate to contact me.