Notes from Python meeting, 24 August 2006

[Ted Roche]

Ten folks attended the PySIG meeting, held as usual on the fourth 
Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator.

It was a vigorous night for discussions and demonstrations. Bill Sconce 
ran the meeting and herded cats as best he could. There was a lot of 
material covered.

Guido van Rossum, Python's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" declared at a 
conference the week before that Django! was the "official" web framework 
for Python, to be treated like other functions in the standard library. 
We discussed the issue at length. We've only seen second hand reports, 
and "official" doesn't mean anything other than a bit more attention for 
one of many web projects.

Ray Côté presented a testing framework he created in Python to exercise 
a web service he'd developed. As changes to the web service were made, 
Ray could just re-run his Python application to confirm he hadn't broken 
any other logic, avoiding regression problems. Ray provided printouts of 
his application and the group reviewed what he had done. Great stuff!

Bill Sconce presented a simple and very Pythonic code example to deal 
with new features in this language. By wrapping the invokation in a 
try... catch structure, the catch snippet can define an equivalent (and 
same-named) function to support the equivalent function in an earlier 
version of Python. His example:

try:
    sorted
except NameError:
    def sorted(iterable):
       l=list(iterable)
       l.sort()
       return l


Another topic Bill covered was a review of an ONLamp article by Mark 
Lutz (author of Learning Python) on common mistakes made in Python.  
(http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/4586). Bill pulled out some of the mistakes 
from that article, and set up examples for us to see and try to work out 
the problem. A great learning exercise!

Yet again another excellent PySIG meeting. Thanks to Bill Sconce for 
organizing and the folks at ABI for letting us use their facilities!