Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

I'll edit http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/WebFrameworksPanel as I update things, but here's the proposal I submitted:

Frameworks:

• Zope (?)
• CherryPy (Robert Brewer)
• TurboGears (Kevin Dangoor?)
• Django (Adrian Holovarty?)
• Pylons (Ben Bangert?
• Quixote (Neil?)
• Twisted web (?)
• web.py (Aaron Swartz?)

2 minute presentation by each representative, introducing:

• point of framework;
• short example
• guess at user base
• size of developer community

Followup questions:

• When did the framework come into existence and what problem was it created to solve?
• Why did the frameworks that existed at the time not meet your particular needs?
• What are its strengths and maturity level? What is it ideal to use for?
• What wouldn't you use it for? why not?
• What frameworks are related?
• What are your future directions?
• How do you feel about WSGI, and what benefits (if any) do you think it brings?
• Do you use an O/R mapping (SQLObject/SQLAlchemy), and if so, what benefits do you think it gives you? Any negatives?
• What template language(s) do you favor/support?
• How well do you support AJAX?
• What sort of testing infrastructure do you use/support?

I'll have a chat server or a Web site where people can ask followup questions, if the Internet connectivity is sufficient (it wasn't, last year!) Otherwise, I'll open the floor up to questions towards the end.

After Mark Eichin's comment on my Jabber e-mail notification post, I realized I had to whip up a twill module for sending Jabber messages. Easily done; here's an example twill script:

extend_with twill_xmpp

jabber_login titus2@xmpp.us XXXXX
send_jabber_message titus@xmpp.us message

Since I know next to nothing about Jabber/XMPP, right now only jabber_login, jabber_logout, and send_jabber_message are implemented. If anyone has some good use cases, though, it might be interesting to see where to take this...

Oh, and e-mail me if you want the extension module. It's short and badly written, but it does work!

--titus

p.s. It does seem a mite silly to have to install pyxmpp, libxml2, dnspython, m2crypto, and twill in order to send XMPP messages. But hey, that's OSS, right?

So, I wrote a custom plugin called 'ocomments' that uses an SQLAlchemy- based database API to assign cookies to users who make comments. That way I can control who has automatic posting access (anyone who posts a sensible message, basically) and who doesn't. I can also toggle comment visibility on an individual or user basis.

Initially, I allowed unapproved postings to be made visible. I hoped (irrationally) that spammers wouldn't find the blog for a while.

Then spammers found the blog and set up an auto-comment-spam loop.

So I made new posts invisible by default.

And still they post!

Or, at least, they try to post. Heh.

I think that's funny.

It's nice that I can certify users. It lets anyone who's already visited post without my ok. Perhaps someday I'll make the ocomments plugin publicly available, once I clean it up a bit...

--titus

p.s. I am not Andrew Kuchling! (c.f. planetpython.org)

A simple program to get pinged whenever you get new e-mail:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import sys, email
from pyxmpp.jid import JID
from pyxmpp.jabber.simple import send_message

inp = sys.stdin.read()
message = email.message_from_string(inp)

jid = 'someid@xmpp.us'
password, recpt = 'XXXXX', 'otherid@xmpp.us'

jid = JID(jid)
if not jid.resource:
    jid = JID(jid.node,jid.domain,"send_message")

recpt = JID(recpt)

s = "From: %s\nSubject: %s" % (message['From'], message['Subject'])

send_message(jid, password, recpt, s, "")

Just pipe each new e-mail message into this, and voila!

I'd like to write something like for buildbot, so that a failing build notifies you. Should be pretty easy.

And, of course, PyXMPP is cool.

--titus

After learning from Jeff Rush that no one had volunteered (yet) to organize a panel on Web technologies, I stepped up to the plate. I've also submitted a talk proposal about twill/scotch/figleaf and (with Grig) I'm going to submit a proposal for a testing tutorial, so attendees may well get tired of hearing my voice. I would be happy if someone else would volunteer to run the panel, hint, hint...

The panel I'm planning to organize is the Web Frameworks panel. The idea is to get a few authors/maintainers of Web frameworks up on a podium and ask them questions about their framework and its relations to other frameworks. A few questions are already up on the Web Frameworks panel page. It sounds like we might be able to score a lunch slot, too, given sufficient effort.

I must admit to having a complete lapse of creativity at the moment, so I'm hoping that I can solicit a few things from the Python community:

• what web frameworks are you interested in seeing represented? (and who should I contact as the maintainer?)
• what questions would you like to have asked?
• what format do you think the panel should be? Pre-selected questions, open floor, etc.?

Let me know...

thanks,

--titus