Pythoneering

I’m at SPA2008, the BCS conference for Software Practice Advancement - feeling quite tired after having led a 6-hour introductory tutorial on Python and Django.

I think it went reasonably well, although we were very pushed for time towards the end.  Cutting out one of the exercises helped, but the final group exercise on Django was still somewhat rushed.  I reckon we got far enough to convey the flavour of Django development, at least.

I might offer a BoF session on Django as a follow-up, to discuss some of the things that were omitted from the tutorial and to give other delegates an opportunity to learn about the best Python web development framework…

Participated in another Django sprint yesterday. This time, I decided to ignore code and focus only on documentation. I managed a small patch to the docs on use of mod_python, plus a much larger patch that provides full documentation for the localflavor add-on. Not earth-shattering stuff, but hopefully someone will find this stuff useful once it gets committed.

I don’t know, you wait ages for a book on Django, then suddenly two come along at once - the second one being Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and TurboGears, by Dana Moore, Raymond Budd and William Wright.

Actually, this particular tome has beaten Adrian and Jacob’s The Definitive Guide to Django to the bookshelves by a good month or more. I’ve only had the merest of chances to flick through it since it arrived from Amazon this morning, but it looks interesting. Once novel feature is an interview with TurboGears’ creator, Kevin Dangoor (but, regrettably, no equivalent interview with any of Django’s core developers). I’m looking forward to delving into this more deeply over the weekend, then comparing it with the official book in a month or so.

While we are on the subject of the official Django book, I notice that the cover has changed again:

Should help with brand recognition! I wonder how they persuaded Apress to let them use the Django logo in place of the regular styling used for the title text of every other Apress book?…

http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2007/nov/13/book-update/

(Damn, need to wipe that drool off my keyboard…)

I’ve just got home from PyCon UK, and a rip-roaring success it was too, IMHO. There were 190 attendees, which certainly exceeded my expectations, and many interesting presentations.

Eye-openers for me included Tim Parkin of Pollenation showing how easily Twisted could be used for web application development and Matthew Pontefract of the Moving Picture Company discussing a Twisted-based framework for distributing computation for CGI movie effects and all kinds of other services across a mesh of loosely-coupled nodes. I also found Christian Tismer’s introduction to Stackless Python to be useful, and I enjoyed the keynotes greatly - particularly the one by Simon Willison on OpenID.

The event as a whole cost far less that some other tech conferences that I’ve attended, and the organisation was superb. I reckon I’ll be back next year…

Eclipse Europa became available to the world on 29 June, and I’ve spent a few happy hours exploring what it can do.

My standard Eclipse set-up consists of the Eclipse SDK, DTP and the Derby plugin for database-related stuff, WTP for web-related stuff, Subversive for version control and PyDev for Python programming. Installation of Europa has upgraded the main SDK to version 3.3, DTP to version 1.5 and WTP to version 2.0.

So, what do I think of it so far? Overall, it looks more like an evolution than a revolution, with a large number of small additions and changes. None of these are particularly dramatic in their impact, but the cumulative effect is rather pleasing. Features I particularly like include

• Streamlined workspace switching
• The new minimize/maximize behaviour, which allows more flexible use of screen real estate
• The ability to toggle display of invisible whitespace (handy for Python code)
• Grouping of referenced JAR files under a single node in Package Explorer - much tidier!
• The ability to hide the Console view and have it reappear whenever the program writes to the standard output or standard error streams

I haven’t had much opportunity to examine the changes in WTP yet, but DTP certainly seems to have improved significantly. There is now good support for HSQLDB and PostgreSQL, and query results can be displayed in either tabular or textual formats. One particularly nice new feature is a wizard for creating tables. To be precise, it generates the SQL DDL commands to create a table, and these can then be executed in the normal way, or saved to a file for future use.

I’ve encountered two problems, one minor, the other less so. The minor issue is with the Welcome screen. On my system (Ubuntu ‘Edgy’ Linux, AMD 64), I don’t get the nice graphical version, just this:

Perhaps the Welcome screen is constructed using HTML and CSS, and there’s some problem with the CSS? In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any problem with the 32-bit Linux version, which displays the Welcome screen just fine on my PC at work.

The more serious issue (on my home PC, at least) is stability. Eclipse 3.2.2 was rock-solid for me, but 3.3 has locked up a few times already. I’m going to experiment with increasing memory allocation to see if that solves the problem.

This is cool (or should that be warm?):

http://www.wickedcoolstuff.com/glwavacomug.html

After many years of using SuSE Linux (ever since version 5.4 or something like that) I’ve finally defected to Ubuntu. This morning, I fired up the Ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy’ Live DVD, double-clicked on Install, and that was that.

Well, not quite. At first, I could boot into neither Ubuntu nor Windows! The problem was that Ubuntu’s bootloader had been installed onto hd0, but the BIOS had the system’s other drive coming first in the boot sequence, which triggered the old bootloader. Once I realised what was going on, it was easy to fix — but I think that Ubuntu’s otherwise foolproof install procedure could do with a bit more polish when it comes to specifying where and how grub is installed.

Things seem OK now (although I have yet to try booting into Windows , and I’ve spent the past couple of hours installing useful stuff from the DVD.  I’m pretty impressed by what I’ve seen so far, but, as a former SuSEr, I’m finding the whole software repositories thing a little confusing, not helped by the fact that the description and screenshots provided in the online docs for Edgy don’t match what I have on my machine!

Whilst scanning The Register today, I came across an advert for a book review that began “Calling all Rails developers that want to learn Ruby!” Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I would have thought it would be advisable to learn Ruby before trying to use Rails?

After Adrian’s announcement that a Django book was in the pipeline, I just had to place my advance order with Amazon (like many other Djangonauts, I suspect). Since then, news on the book’s progress has been hard to come by. Not any more, though, with the appearance of www.djangobook.com.

This site will allow the Django community to participate in the production of Adrian and Jacob’s book, in much the same way that Bruce Eckel has allowed readers to comment on his material as it is written. Of course, the Django book site is a much more impressive piece of work than Eckel’s system, showing off Adrian and Jacob’s ‘leet web dev skills to the full. It is Django-powered (natch) and distinctively styled, with a neat mechanism for viewing and adding comments and an Atom feed so that we can all keep track of new chapters as they appear. Excellent stuff.