The Mouse Vs. The Python

Last Thursday (the 5th) I attended Pyowa, the local Iowa Python Users group I founded a few years ago. We had Scott Peterson from Principal Financial Group come and talk to us about Library Gadget, a cool Django-based website he created to track what library books his family has checked out. Now he has lots of users using his website. It not only tracks the books you have borrowed, but it’ll auto-renew them if it can and let you know if you’re books are overdue.

He spent most of his time talking about the backend stuff behind the website though. Such as why he chose Amazon Web Services, how he uses Puppet, Vagrant and Fabric to manage his server’s settings and back them up.

The second talk was done by myself and I spoke on my MediaLocker project, an open source wxPython application that is supposed to help you track your media library. Most of my time was spent telling the story behind the project and showing a demo. Then I took some questions.

Overall, I’d say that we had a really good meeting with 10 people showing up. Next month, on February 2nd, we’re bringing in the BIG guns though. We have Doug Hellman and Steve Holden scheduled to Skype in and talk to us.

Doug Hellman is the author of The Python Standard Library By Example, is a senior developer with Racemi, Inc., and communications director of the Python Software Foundation. He has programmed with Python since version 1.4, and has worked on multiple platforms in mapping, medical publishing, banking, and data center automation. Hellmann was previously columnist and editor-in-chief for Python Magazine and, since 2007, has blogged the popular Python Module of the Week

Steve Holden is chairman of the Python Software Foundation and author of Python Web Programming. He owns Python consulting business and does Python training.

TurboGears is one of several web frameworks for Python that are available. The most popular by far is Django. Where I work, we chose TurboGears because of its integration with SQLAlchemy which supports composite keys. At that time, Django did not support that feature and I am not sure if it does yet. Anyway, I develop almost exclusively on a Windows box and have found the TurboGears’ documentation on the subject a little confusing. So here’s how I do it.

Note: We’ll be using TurboGears 2.1 in this tutorial (more…)

As PyCon approaches, the blogger community was invited to interview the speakers that are coming to the event. I chose Wesley Chun, writer of Core Python Programming and co-author of Python Web Development with Django. In this interview, I ask Wesley about his talk, Running Django Apps on Google App Engine and about PyCon in general. Let’s see what he has to say: (more…)

It’s almost the end of January already and PyCon USA 2011 is just around the corner. In this edition, we cover a wide variety of topics, from Python 2.7 – 3.x. We’ve got sprints, new books, web-related projects and good old recursion articles. Come one, come all! Read the news of the week!

• eWeek reports that Python Skills are in demand this year
• zzzeek’s Guide to Python 3 Porting by Michael Bayer, the man behind SqlAlchemy.
• Foundations of Python Network Programming: A Last Hurrah For Python 2. Brandon Rhodes (former editor of Python Magazine) talks about a book he just finished writing.
• Python Sprints is sponsoring Software Carpentry 2011. Details are sparse and I’m not really familiar with either organization, but this sounds interesting.
• Shannon Behrens talks about Python SSL Hell on his blog
• Learn how to deploy Python WSGI apps behind nginx
• Learn New-style PyQt Signals and Slots on Mario Boikov’s blog
• Building Python with LLVM 2.8 (and why I still love the project) by Brett Cannon.
• A little discussion of tail recursion can be found in the following article: Tail Recursion in Python using Pysistence

On the PyCon front, you should take note the Early Bird pricing is now over. Why did you wait? Fortunately, they are still selling tickets, so stop stalling and just come! The PyCon blog also mentions that they’re still looking for sponsors, so if you or someone you know has that kind of cashola, point them in that direction.

And now we return you back to your regularly scheduled blog reading…

It’s time for another edition of the “weekly Python news”! What happened this week in Python world? You’ve come to the right place to find out. We missed the announcement last week about Germany’s Python Academy’s course schedule, so be sure to check that out. This week we have a lot of news from the Python web world (again) as well as news about a great new Python book.

• Working with Django Settings files – I don’t do much with Django right now, but this looks interesting.
• The Hudson project is supposedly going to get forked. The new fork is called Jenkins. You can read all about it on Greg Turnquist’s blog
• The Pyramid project is a new development from the Pylons people. In this blog you can learn about Pyramid’s Auth API.
• Did you know about ep.io, a new Python hosting service? Well you can read about it here if you like
• Enthought recently added PySide support to some of their products.
• Mark Lutz and O’Reilly have released the 4th edition of Programming Python, which is updated for Python 3. You can buy it from Amazon right now!
• Wingware’s latest 4.0 beta is now out. You can read about it here and here

If you think that some news is missing, be sure to drop me a line via the comments or the contact form. Have a great week!

I thought it might be fun (and self-motivating) to create a weekly or bi-weekly series on interesting Python / Tech news items. I realize this is pretty unoriginal, but I like the idea of creating a regular “column” and I’m hoping it will help me stay in the writing groove. Ned Batchelderr does this sort of thing from time-to-time too, so feel free to check his out as well. I’ll include some comments so you know what your getting and what I think about the topic, if anything. (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…)

Earlier this year, I was tasked with creating an application that would download information from our organization’s website using Python. The tricky part was that it would be encrypted, gzipped and the payload would be JSON. Could Python do all that? Well, that’s what I wanted to find out. Now it’s time for you to learn what I discovered. (more…)