1,225 posts tagged “python”
The Python programming language.
2008
Replacing Django’s Template Language With Jinja2. Part of Will Larson’s series on taking advantage of Django’s loose coupling.
Django 1.0 alpha release notes. The big features are newforms-admin, unicode everywhere, the queryset-refactor ORM improvements and auto-escaping in templates.
Django 1.0 alpha released! Not meant for production use, but a pretty solid preview of what’s coming in 1.0 proper. The beta is scheduled for August 5th.
DjangoCon 2008. The official DjangoCon site is up, along with a mostly complete schedule.
Jinja2 Final aka Jinjavitus Released. The Jinja template engine now has auto-escaping as an optional feature, disabled by default. Worth considering as an almost drop-in replacement for Django’s template language if features such as macros and compilation to Python code appeal to you.
Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python. Eye-opening tutorial on building a recursive descent parser for Python, in Python that uses top-down operator precedence.
DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Gooleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.
ftputil. Python’s built-in ftplib is ridiculously low level, requiring you to send RETR commands and even assemble downloaded chunks yourself using a callback. ftputil looks like a really solid high-level interface to that module with file-like objects and plenty of convenient methods.
Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.
Django Unit Tests and Transactions. If you’re using a transactional database engine (MySQL with InnoDB, Postgres or SQLite) you can speed things up by running each of your unit tests inside a transaction and rolling back in tearDown().
OSM routing, A*, cycle-filtered, python (via) A python library for finding routes using OpenStreetMap data.
Running C and Python Code on The Web. Adobe are working on a toolchain to compile C code to target the Tamarin VM in Flash. This will allow existing C code (from CPython to Quake) to execute in a safe sandbox in the browser.
Whitespace Sensitivity. Amusingly, Ruby is actually far more sensitive about whitespace than Python is.
Graphite. Real-time graphing package for server monitoring, similar to RRDTool. Created by the team at Orbitz, using Django and ExtJS for the frontend and Cairo to generate the graphs.
How-to: Full-text search in Google App Engine. Use search.SearchableModel instead of db.Model—it’s pretty rough at the moment which is probably why it’s still undocumented.
CookBookNewFormsFieldOrdering. Handy tip—change the order of fields in a Django newforms instance by over-riding form.fields.keyOrder (since fields is a SortedDict).
Django snippets: Command to dump data as a python script. Extremely useful—dumps the data for an application as an executable Python script which will re-import it in to another database without any risk of colliding with existing IDs, sorting out foreign keys along the way.
The basics of creating a tumblelog with Django (via) Ryan Berg suggests having a StreamItem model that links uses a GenericForeignKey to link to other content types, then using signals to cause a StreamItem to be created for every other model type. I should switch to doing that on this blog: at the moment I have to query three separate tables to build the tumblelog part which results in messy code for ordering and pagination.
Tailor. “Tailor is a tool to migrate or replicate changesets between ArX, Bazaar, Bazaar-NG, CVS, Codeville, Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Monotone, Subversion and Tla repositories.”—written in Python.
jsontime. Nat and I threw this together this morning—it runs on Google App Engine and exposes Python’s pytz timezone library over JSONP.
PortingDjangoTo3k. Martin von Loewis has started assembling a patch. His write-up illustrates some key differences between Python 2.X and Python 3—it looks like Django’s unicode handling is going to require the most work.
Reddit release their codebase. Under the same Common Public Attribution License used by Facebook for their recent source release.
New foundation for Django. Django now has its own nonprofit software foundation (courtesy of a bunch of tough paperwork by Jacob Kaplan-Moss), and fittingly the Lawrence-Journal World get the exclusive.
PEP 372—Adding an ordered dictionary to collections. Yes please!
Spicing Up Embedded JavaScript. John Resig collects the various ways in which a JavaScript interpreter can be hosted by Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Java. There are full JS implementations in PHP, Perl and Java; Ruby and Python both have modules that use an embedded SpiderMonkey.
DebugFooter middleware with Pygments sql syntax highlighting. Andreas Marr has enhanced my Django DebugFooter middleware with proper syntax highlighting for the logged SQL.
Censoring the Internet at Paraguay. The state owned telecommunication company DNS hijacked the opposition party’s domain to point at a porn site during the election back in April. Maybe we don’t want a django.py vanity domain after all...
RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline. Jacob’s proposed target is “early September” for the final 1.0 release.
Shortcutting render_to_response. I tend to use a simple wrapper function, but the other options described here are worth exploring. This is why I’m so keen on Django’s “take a request object, return a response object” philosophy—it makes it trivial to extend the framework in the direction you want.
Python + Hadoop = Flying Circus Elephant. Last.fm have released Dumbo, a Python module that lets you easily write Hadoop map/reduce tasks using Python and generators.