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:

1) What do you want the attendees to take away from this talk?

I’d like all attendees to come away from this talk with a greater sense of optimism they can take their Django apps and run them with little or no modification on Google App Engine, taking advantage of the scalability they need and is so difficult to achieve on your own.

Part of this talk is pseudo-marketing to bring more awareness to Django-nonrel, which is the foundation of how to get Django apps to run on App Engine. For the past several years since App Engine debuted in 2008, there have been several tools, called the Helper and the Patch, to help you run Django apps on App Engine. Unfortunately, those older systems required you to modify your apps’ data models in order to get them to run on App Engine. This is not the case with Django-nonrel, which should take its place as the leading tool that users should use when desiring to run Django apps on any NoSQL or non-relational database.

Along with Django-nonrel, developers also need the corresponding NoSQL adapter code, djangoappengine (for Google App Engine’s datastore), Django-mongodb-engine (for MongoDB). they (and others) are working on adapters to other NoSQL databases, but more exciting than that is the prospect of having NoSQL JOINs!

2) What made you decide to speak on this topic?

I wanted to give this talk for many reasons… I already mentioned awareness earlier. The other thing is that people are so used to the Helper and the Patch, that they don’t realize there’s a better tool out there.

Another important reason is the concept of vendor lock-in, the phenomenon where you can’t easily migrate your apps and/or data to different platforms because you’re “locked in” by your current vendor. people complain that you can’t run App Engine apps anywhere else, but this is not true. You can choose a different backend besides Google’s original… two of these backends are AppScale and TyphoonAE. similarly, if you created a Django app and ran it via traditional hosting, Django-nonrel helps you bring it to App Engine with very little porting. Similarly, if you write a Django app and run it on App Engine using Django-nonrel, it shouldn’t take much work to move it to traditional hosting.

3) What are the pros and cons in using Django on Google App Engine?

The most obvious pro is scalability. This is something that’s both very difficult and very expensive to build. why not take advantage of all the smart people at Google that have built scalability into their core infrastructure that helps them be…, well, Google! With Django-nonrel, if Google isn’t right for you, you can take your app and run it elsewhere! no vendor lock-in here.

One con would be that App Engine’s datastore is still difficult to wrap your head around if you’re used to the traditional relational database model. you can’t do raw SQL or JOINs completely yet. Google does give you a stripped-down SQL syntax known as GQL, but it’s not the complete picture. Also, in exchange for its benefits, you do have to give up some control over your app by letting Google host it. you can’t use any C/C++ extensions, and don’t have access to your logs or other raw files.

4) What are you most looking forward to at PyCon this year?

I’m looking forward to connecting with familiar and friendly faces of those I’ve met over the past decade of attending Python and open source conferences. Because we’re all so geographically diverse, it’s the one time you can count on to see people you haven’t seen in a year and to catch up, either in the exhibit hall or part of an interesting hallway conversation.

I’m also excited to learn new things that are part of the Python universe. every year it seems to grow a bit more, so it’s a struggle to stay up-to-date with what’s been going on in the community. I’m also looking forward to reprising my Python 3 talk from last year, partly because it’s becoming more important every year, and as part of my research for the talk, I’ll be finding out which projects have moved to Python 3.

5) What were your favorite parts of PyCon in previous years?

The best part of the Python ecosphere is having a great programming language to rally behind, but the next best thing is the people… the Python community itself. And PyCon is the best place to interact with the community. the conference is phenomenal because of the talks, ability to reach to all skill levels (from beginner through advanced), superb tutorials stretching across TWO days, compelling session talks, amazing lightning talks and open space sessions, and of course, the hallway conversations, not to mention that crazy memes and hacks such as OHwar –http://pycon.ohwar.com — that come from such convos.

Just think: you could meet your favorite Python author at PyCon this year AND learn about Django and Google App Engine at the same time. And if that doesn’t float your boat, Wesley is also doing a talk on Python 3. What are you waiting for? Get on over to the PyCon website and sign yourself up!

Note: This article cross-posted to the PyCon blog

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.

• Bluebream is the new Zope 3. Yes, this is old news, but I keep forgetting the new name.
• Some would say this is old news too: Pyramid is the new Pylons. Reminds me of Pinax and Django really. Maybe I’m doing this to help me keep track of the always changing Python web frameworks!
• PyPy 1.4 is out! I’ve never used PyPy, but I like the concept. Unfortunately, there’s no Windows version of this release. On the bright side, Chui Tey has written an article on how to build one.
• Don’t know how to compile PyCrypto on Windows 64-bit machines? Read this article and increase your knowledge!
• Your favorite snake birthed it’s latest: Python 3.2 beta 2. Read about what’s new or just download it and start reporting any bugs you find.
• I just discovered this: an interactive browser-based Python console built with Silverlight / IronPython by Michael Foord. Note: this crashed in Firefox – YMMV
• Python GUI toolkit updates: PySide 1.0.0 Beta 2 (the open source version of PyQt by Nokia) and PyGUI 2.3.3
• The Python Certificate and a thread on the topic with Steve Holden answering questions.

If you have some Python news items that you think I should include in an upcoming post, just drop me a line or leave a comment.

On Thursday, July 1st, we had our July Pyowa meeting. It was hosted by Matt Morrison at the IMT Group’s building in Des Moines, IA. We had our largest attendance ever with a total of 15 men showing up. Tavern Pizza and pop were served, which was also a first…we’ve had pop before, just not any food!

We had two presentations. The first was an around 70 minutes in length and covered introductory materials about Django, a full-stack web framework written in Python. It was given by our host and he also included anecdotes about how his company uses Django and what challenges that has presented him. Next up we had a quick talk about TurboGears, another web framework. TurboGears is actually a collection of various Python modules that have been pieced together, which makes it much more modular than Django. However, Django has a lot more users behind it and there are some definite advantages to having everything builtin. Anyway, the TurboGears presentation covered a group of different web sites (or web applications) that the presenter had created. It was interesting to compare and contrast the two frameworks and see how they differed or stayed the same.

We are currently looking for presenters for our August and September meetings, so if you want to talk about how you’re using Python now, in the past or even what you plan to do with it in the future, let me know by emailing me or in the comments!

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.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at its readability and the quality of the code examples. I have read a lot of Python books and other programming texts and more often than not, the examples are wanting in one way or another. Some of the books have downright broken examples. Hourieh does a very good job of explaining his code by going through just about everything he wrote line-by-line. While that can get a little monotonous after a while, his meticulousness does make sure that the reader grasps what’s going on.

The main thrust of this book is to teach the audience how to build a social bookmarking application. In fact, that is the only thing you will create in the entire book. The last two chapters are on deploying the application on a web server and improving the application with caching and security enhancements.

I read the core of the book. I didn’t really need to know how to install Django as I had done that before and I didn’t mess with deploying it either since I don’t have a development box at the moment to use for a web server. What I did read was really good.

This book teaches you all the fundamentals you’ll need to create a web application in Django, from start to finish. There were a couple of minor sentence structure goof ups and some lightheartedness that seemed kind of out of place, but other than that, it is a very solid book. You will learn how Django’s user management model works, how to AJAX with jQuery, add voting and commenting to the bookmarking application, create an admin interface using Django’s built-in tools, add some basic searching capabilities, and build a social network where you can invite your friends. If you’ve ever wondered about the internals of a site like Facebook, this book will give you a taste. I should note that the cover implies that it teaches how to build web applications, while the text only really shows the reader how to create one application. The concepts to create other applications are there, but I thought that statement was a little mis-leading.

Overall, I recommend this book. Let me know what you think when you’ve had a chance to read it as well.