The Mouse Vs. The Python

Elixir is a lightweight declarative layer on top of SqlAlchemy that’s been around since 2006, well before SqlAlchemy released their own built-in Declarative syntax. Elixir was created by a collaboration between Jonathan LaCour, Daniel Haus and Gaëtan de Menten who had a passion for making SqlAlchemy even easier to use. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to to create our own database with Elixir and how to communicate with a pre-existing database. (more…)

Last time, we looked at one of Python’s built-in XML parsers. In this article, we will look at the fun third-party package, lxml from codespeak. It uses the ElementTree API, among other things. The lxml package has XPath and XSLT support, includes an API for SAX and a C-level API for compatibility with C/Pyrex modules. We’ll just do a few simple things with it though. (more…)

If you’re a long time reader, you may remember that I started programming Python in 2006. Within a year or so, my employer decided to move away from Microsoft Exchange to the open source Zimbra client. Zimbra is an alright client, but it was missing a good way to alert the user to the fact that they had an appointment coming up, so I had to create a way to query Zimbra for that information and show a dialog. What does all this mumbo jumbo have to do with XML though? Well, I thought that using XML would be a great way to keep track of which appointments had been added, deleted, snoozed or whatever. It turned out that I was wrong, but that’s not the point of this story. (more…)

Packt Publishing gave me an ebook copy of their brand new book, MySQL for Python by Albert Lukaszewski. I’ll be working on reading through that this month and will hopefully have a review for all of you to read before December. They also gave me this link to a free chapter. Feel free to read it or skip it.