PySIG report 27 Oct 2011 [Project Night]

[Bill Sconce]

Another successful PySIG! A surprisingly good turnout last night,
considering that our intrepid Pythoneers had to brave the wilds
of Southern NH's first wet-the-roads snowfall. It was mushy to
the west -- a couple of inches in Peterborough. Six of us made
it; David O. brought the milk -- Thanks, David!

"Project night":

  o Shawn O. introduced us to two Python packages which he's used
    in real production:

     1. web.py

     "web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at
     reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of
     the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of
     daily page views. 'It's the anti-framework framework. web.py
     doesn't get in your way,' explained founder Steve Huffman..."

     It's perhaps [not, given that this is Python] amazing that
     you can create a Web server with 12 lines of code. It's
     certainly amazing that such a framework is not a toy. Shawn
     used it for real $WORK applications, and of course reddit.com
     was a real, and large-scale, Internet site. Worth a look.

     http://webpy.org/

     2. rhodecode

     "This will change the way you manage your code"

     "Open source repository browser/management tool with a 
     built in push/pull server, LDAP, permissions sytem and
     full text search."

     [I especially like the lack of fine print in their
     licensing blurb:
         RhodeCode is an open source software. It's
         available to everybody for free, forever.
     ]

     Shawn outlined how pleased he's been with rhodecode,
     especially the built-in intgration with LDAP and its
     full-text search capabilities.  Thanks, Shawn!

  o Firefox custom keybinding (Bill S.)

     I outlined a work in progress, a Python automation of
     the five-or-six-step procedure necessary to modify the
     configuration file ("browser.xul") which maps keyboard
     shortcuts in the 3.6 series of Firefox. What's neat
     is that PySIG makes a darned good design review -- I had
     already discovered in my work so far that my old friend
     optparse has been deprecated (as of 2.7), in favor of
     argparse; the group told me, and we discussed, why.

     Even better, the comments convinced me to abandon my
     brute-force approach (of finding and replacing text
     lines), in favor of properly parsing the XML -- i.e.,
     to use lxml. I'll have a progress report next time.
     And in the meantime, really appreciate the improvement
     in design which a group of friends can provide.
     Thanks, guys...

Till next time. (Which, after looking at the calendar, we'll
make happen on November 17th, third Thursday, since "our"
4th Thursday is Thanksgiving.)


>>> pysig.eat(ginger_cookies.next())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pysig.py", line 11, in <module>
    ginger_cookies.next()
StopIteration
>>>

-Bill

_______
Sent from my virusproofed Linux PC