Bjørn Stabell 白熊

FLOSS Weekly is really on fire! The last episode of the podcast has a really interesting interview with Greg Stein, previous chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of the Python Software Foundation, creator of mod_dav and lots of other open source projects. They touch on the disappearence of proprietary software, Google Code, how Microsoft was shipping Python as part of their e-commerce and SiteServer suites, and so on. Highly recommended.

On occasion of the second world-wide Django sprint we got together 12 people to sprint at Exoweb’s office yesterday.

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If you’re in Beijing, know Python, have played around with Django, and want to roll up your sleeves and contribute some code to open source, then feel free to join as at the Exoweb office Saturday Dec 1st from 11:30 until 24:00 for the Django sprint.

If you want to come, please post a comment to this blog and put your name on the Django sprint wiki page under the Beijing section, so that we can gauge how many are coming and keep informed if there are any updates.

(See also Exoweb planet for more information on Exoweb and our office.)

Warning: This is a rant.

With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.

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Guido just announced it Time to experiment.

Tired of fighting with browsers on CSS issues regarding layouts, styling of buttons, or generating print versions? Then you’d probably be interested in the Blueprint CSS Framework which I discovered via Mark Boulton. It’s getting great reviews, looks to have a lot of promise… and by a fellow Norwegian to top it off. Check the tutorial for a good introduction.

Although easy_install might be sufficient to install a Python package (aka egg) onto your system, it doesn’t help you find available packages or see what you have on your system. Most package managers does, so this was a bit surprising. I was frustrated enough that I started looking at what it would take to make one. I came so far as to create a little utility built on top of setuptools that downloaded the Python Package Index (aka cheeseshop, aka PyPI) using httplib2 with caching.

Searching for pypi using this utility I saw a couple of packages, including one called yolk that promised to be a “Command-line tool querying PyPI and Python packages installed on your system.” Great! Saved me a lot of work.

Yolk not only allows you to search PyPI using yolk -S <name>, it also gives you a way to query the packages that you have installed on your system using yolk -l. I’ve NEVER seen this before for Python eggs, so it was quite fun. Yolk doesn’t cache stuff from the PyPI, however, so that’s a bit of a downer for us living in bandwidth-challenged areas like China.

If you wonder, yolk is a word play on “egg yolk“, which is the yellow part of the egg. Python packages as done by setuptools are called eggs, thus the name.

By the way, httplib2, although not part of the standard library, is quite a bit better than urllib2 or httplib, and apparently the only way to easily make HTTP requests that use HTTP methods besides GET and POST; i.e., PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc, as required by REST. It also exposes a very feature-complete client-side cache, so you can do:

I hope the standard library cleanup project that is planned for Python 3000 includes this module, and updates it so that it can support file-like interface to reading, not just returning a string like it does now. A compatibility module with the old http/url modules would be cool too.

Update! Flávio blogs about this too, includes a script for updating Python packages, and in a comment mentions enstaller, an alternative package manager for Python eggs which can do similar things to yolk, but also upgrading of packages. Mikeal also blogs about this and includes a simpler script for updating Python packages.

At OSCON 2007 Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Simon Willison, and Jeremy Dunck held a Django Master Class. Jacob just posted the slides on the web, and it contains a few goodies, like:

• testing strategies
• testing support in Django
• dumpdata
• templatetags introduction
• custom model fields
• OpenID (which seems to be on Simon’s mind a lot lately)
• a cool example using jQuery to do Ajax-style client-side form validation based on conditions set in the Django model(!)
• deployment options for high-performance sites
• Geo Django + PostGIS for geo-coordinate manipulation

After hearing about it on an ITC podcast (also mentioned in previous post) I ordered the “RESTful Web Services” book from Amazon (and got into an argument with Sam Ruby regarding Python pain points; he seems to be a Ruby-convert these days). It arrived last week, and I spent a lot of this weekend browsing through the book, and this is a review of sorts.

This book has a star rating of 5 out of 5 on Amazon, and I agree it’s worth it. It covers a lot of ground and includes material rarely found elsewhere.

The first part covers REST basics, like the meaning and usage of the HTTP methods GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, as well as HEAD. I’m pretty familiar with that part of REST and HTTP, but people that don’t know the basic premise of REST, and haven’t heard of conditional GETs, partial GETs, caching, content negotiation, compression, and the various HTTP return codes should read the first part carefully; the whole premise of REST is to use HTTP the way it was designed, so you’d better know HTTP. The REST Wikipedia entry gives a good basic intro to REST. I find many web site optimization sites give a good introduction to HTTP features.

The authors also show how to use existing best-practice web services such as Amazon’s S3 and Google.

The meat of the book is in the middle where the authors show how to design a read-only and read-write web application in a RESTful way. There were a few new and interesting things for me:

1. A step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful web services app
2. A discussion of URI design conventions
3. An overview of hypermedia formats (e.g., XML and microformats) that can be used to represent state
4. Discussions about the tricky situations where REST just doesn’t seem to fit, e.g., when you need transactions

I’ll summarize the first three.

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Martijn Faassen (whom apparently started EuroPython years back) did the funniest lightning talk at this year’s EuroPython, promoting his new web framework Grok, built on Zope:

Talking to him, he seemed very passionate to reinvigorate Zope through Grok. I must say I think both Zope 3 and Grok are quantum leaps forward compared to Zope 2.x, and I’m sure they’ll pick up more developers over time. It’s going to take some time for me, though, who got pretty burnt by the Zope/ZODB combination, to give it another try again. And I don’t think I’ll ever trust a database that doesn’t explicitly enforce a schema; it’s just a recipe for maintenance hell.