The Mouse Vs. The Python

Last week, I embarked on an adventure into the world of web application programming. Since my work place uses Python as much as possible and my boss likes TurboGears, I chose it for this endeavor. I have worked through various TurboGears tutorials and thought it looked pretty cool. However, it doesn’t take long to discover that there is a lot of undocumented functionality. In this case, I needed a web application that could access multiple databases. I knew SqlAlchemy could do it and since TG2 uses SqlAlchemy, I figured it would too. In this article you will get to travel down the rabbit hole with me as I explain how I figured it out.
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I received Ayman Hourieh’s Django 1.0 Web Site Development from Packt Publishers a few weeks ago for review. I had worked with Django before when I went through another book on Python web frameworks as well as one of their official tutorials. I had my doubts about this book because it was only 257 pages long and I didn’t think it would be able to teach me much in so few pages.

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This month, I finished uploading the videos I had recorded for May’s Pyowa meeting. I thought it would be relatively easy to do some recording and uploading, but I think I made it harder than I needed when I bought an HD camera. Here’s my story of how I go about recording our meetings right now.

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After Pycon was over, I contacted the people on the python group organizers mailing list to see how to get contacts from publishers in the hopes of gathering contacts and acquiring some swag for the Iowa Python Users Group (AKA Pyowa) meetings.
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Now that I’ve covered the major stuff that I went to at PyCon 2009, I thought I should write a quick note about the other stuff I saw and did. I already mentioned going to the Open Space for Authors and Editors and the wxPython BoF, so I won’t rehash those here.
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On Sunday, I went to the morning lightning talks a little late. None of them really jumped out at me as I was distracted by updating this blog and trying to update myself on other things. I’m sure I missed out on some good stuff, though. What I didn’t miss was the Reddit keynote.
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From 4-5:15, Steve Holden held a Teach Me Web Testing Open Space session in which he set up his laptop and a projector, loaded his website, put some whiskey and vodka out on a table and then asked the crowd to teach him how to test his website using tools written in Python.
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In the afternoon of the 2nd official day of PyCon 2009, I started off the talks with Ed Leafe’s Dabo talk on web applications using Dabo. He used a product that they have created called Springboard that kind of does a Google Gears type of interaction with the web.
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I didn’t get a chance to write about what happened on Saturday at PyCon, so here’s a quick rundown of what I saw and did in the morning: I walked over to the Hyatt from Crowne Plaza with a researcher from Belgium. Then I attended the morning lightning talks and Guido’s keynote.

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On March 27th, 2009, we held a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting at PyCon 2009. I stuck it on the Open Space board and we had around 18 people show up with a couple that would drift in and out of the room. I think it was one of the high points for me because I go to meet others who use the wx framework. Christopher Barker was also there, and it was great to meet him.
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