15 items tagged “ian-bicking”
2010
The Web Server Benchmarking We Need. Ian Bicking asks for a WSGI benchmark which emphasises error handling over raw performance—can the server keep serving requests if some of them are CPU bound, I/O bound, wedged or cause a segfault?
Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes).
2009
There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It's just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn't help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development.
2008
A Few Corrections To “On Packaging”. From Ian Bicking.
On packaging. James Bennett discusses the problems with setuptools (and ruby gems), and recommends Ian Bicking’s pip as a setuptools replacement.
lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library. I just wish I could get the wretched thing to install on OS X Leopard without resorting to MacPorts.
Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby (via) Deliberately provocative title, but makes a well considered case for restrained use of monkey patching in Ruby. Cultural norms around monkey patching seem to me to be one of the core differences between the Ruby and Python communities.
2007
WebOb. WebOb is “an extraction and refinement of pieces from Paste”—provides a very nice request and response object, clearly inspired partly by Django. The documentation includes the differences between the WebOb API and that of other frameworks.
I can't help feel that BDD is a case of a bad idea spreading; the motivations for BDD are fine (a change in developer testing workflow), but the technique they use to try to reach the desired workflow is totally bizarre.
virtualenv 0.8.1. Ian Bicking’s tool for creating isolated Python environments; designed to replace his earlier workingenv package. Does anyone have any experience using this? It looks fantastically useful.
The Shrinking Python Web Framework World. Python used to suffer from a paradox of choice with regards to Web frameworks; today things are considerably easier for new developers.
DictMixin. I wasn’t aware of this Python class (part of the UserDict module): lets you implement __get__, __set__, __del__ and keys() and provides the other dictionary methods for you.
Atom Models. Building Python classes that act as utility wrappers around data stored in an lxml DOM object.
Wait For It (via) Neat WSGI middleware from Ian Bicking that launches a thread for every incoming request and watches for slow responses; if something is taking too long it returns a “please wait” page to the user and polls for completion.