Simon Willison’s Weblog

TweetyPy. A Python-based CLI client for Twitter, by Stuart Colville

# 24th March 2007, 4:47 pm / stuart-colville, python, twitter, tweetypy, cli

Algorithm Education in Python (via) A paper describing the usage of Python in Algorithm courses at UC Irvine. I found Python invaluable when I was at university and would have loved to see it become part of the official curriculum.

# 19th March 2007, 1:46 pm / python, education

pg8000 v1.02. The pure Python PostgreSQL library now supports DB-API 2.0 (and SSL too). That didn’t take long!

# 13th March 2007, 9:18 pm / postgresql, dbapi, pg8000, python

pg8000 (via) A pure-Python interface to PostgreSQL, using the PostgreSQL network protocol directly. Doesn’t (yet) support DB-API 2.0, but that’s promised in a future release.

# 9th March 2007, 7:35 pm / postgresql, python, pg8000

Hacking del.icio.us with Python. Nat introduces snaflr, a Python script for republishing selected links from a number of del.icio.us users to one communal account.

# 6th March 2007, 11:11 pm / delicious, python, natalie-downe

Five things I hate about Python. By Jacob Kaplan-Moss. I didn’t know you could force eggs to install unzipped with an option in ~/.pydistutils.cfg—that’s always been my least favourite thing about them.

# 4th March 2007, 10:32 pm / eggs, python, jacob-kaplan-moss

pear 0.8. “A libevent/pyevent-based locking session daemon for the web”. Relational databases aren’t particularly well suited to the access characteristics of session data.

# 4th March 2007, 9:19 pm / sessions, libevent, python

Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites. Slides from a talk at PyCon. Be sure to switch to the notes view (Ø in the bottom right)—a really nice overview of scaling up from a CGIs to load balanced, memcached Python application servers.

# 4th March 2007, 9:14 pm / memcached, python, scaling, pycon

soupselect. My simple extension to BeautifulSoup that allows you to grab elements using CSS selectors; should be useful for parsing microformats.

# 28th February 2007, 1:47 pm / soupselect, beautifulsoup, python, css, microformats

Django snippets. James Bennett’s new site for Django snippets. The source code to the whole site is available.

# 26th February 2007, 10:08 am / django, django-snippets, james-bennett, python

PyCon Day 1: OLPC Has Excited me. Did you know that the OLPC machines have a “show source” button?

# 23rd February 2007, 11:21 pm / olpc, python, pycon

30 second PyPy tutorial. Zyroth on programming.reddit.com shows how to interactively compile a Python function to C using PyPy and benchmark it against the original.

# 18th February 2007, 9:30 pm / python, pypy

Automated Translation of Java to Python. java2python can translate most Java code in to non-idiomatic Python, using ANTLR for the heavy lifting.

# 15th February 2007, 3:50 pm / antlr, java2python, java, python

Say Hello to Elixir for SQLAlchemy. New ActiveRecord style layer over SQLAlchemy; a collaboration that includes the authors of ActiveMapper and TurboEntity.

# 12th February 2007, 10:28 pm / sqlalchemy, python, elixir

soaplib (via) New open-source Python SOAP library, with a pleasantly Pythonic looking API.

# 12th February 2007, 10:26 pm / jonathan-lacour, python, soap, web-services, soaplib

boto. Python library for accessing Amazon’s S3, SQS and EC2 Web Services, with excellent documentation.

# 11th February 2007, 12:17 am / python, amazon, s3, sqs, ec2, boto, aws

Parallel Python. A simple mechanism for running Python code in parallel across multiple processes and/or machines, based on submitting jobs and retrieving their results.

# 9th February 2007, 1:51 am / python, parallelpython

Mono 1.2.3 has been released (via) More importantly, it ships with IronPython in the form of Seo Sanghyeon’s Community Edition.

# 9th February 2007, 12:55 am / mono, ironpython, python

TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison). Ian Bicking explores the differences between the two, and finds that the most significant is probably CherryPy v.s. Paste.

# 7th February 2007, 1:51 pm / turbogears, pylons, python, cherrypy, paste

IronPython URLs. Mark Rees’ and Seo Sanghyeon’s collection of interesting URLs posted to the IronPython mailing list.

# 4th February 2007, 5:25 pm / ironpython, python

nose. Really nice Python unit testing tool—run ’nosetests somedir’ and it finds and executes every unittest (and test_like function) it can find in that directory tree.

# 1st February 2007, 2:20 am / nose, python, unittests

Spelling correction using the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Uses porter stemming to implement a search engine ’did you mean’ feature based on the Brown Corpus.

# 31st January 2007, 10:07 pm / browncorpus, porterstemming, python, natural-language, nltk

Pickles Begone. Barry Warsaw’s notes on adding SQLAlchemy persistence to Mailman.

# 23rd January 2007, 1:43 pm / mailman, sqlalchemy, python, barry-warsaw

CSS library for Python (via) “A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implements the DOM Level 2 Style Stylesheets and CSS interfaces.”

# 15th January 2007, 2:32 am / css, python

Apache Solr 1.1. Solr is the search Web Service built on top of Lucene. The latest release introduces JSON, Python and Ruby response formats in addition to XML.

# 13th January 2007, 1:16 am / json, python, ruby, xml, webservice, search, lucene, solr

What Python looks like naked. Michal Wallace has been doing some really interesting work writing purely functional code in Python. His latest experiment replaces all of the basic Python statements with equivalent functions.

# 10th January 2007, 11:22 pm / functional, michal-wallace, python

mimeparse.py (via) Parsing mime-types is harder than you might think.

# 8th January 2007, 6:43 pm / mimetypes, python, james-bennett

supervisor2. I haven’t tried this yet, but looks like a decent process monitoring tool. It even has an XML-RPC interface.

# 8th January 2007, 1:19 am / xml-rpc, python, supervisor

Why doesn’t Python have more data format readers in the stdlib? I for one would love to see simplejson included in the standard library, with or without a C implementation.

# 8th January 2007, 1:03 am / python, json, stdlib

Writing a Jokosher extension. I like the way API calls are made through an API object passed to the extension’s startup function.

# 7th January 2007, 10:25 pm / python, api, jokosher, stuart-langridge