1,069 items tagged “python”
The Python programming language.
2009
A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
This morning we launched the Guardian Open Platform at a well attended event in our new offices in Kings Place. This is one of the main projects I’ve been helping out with since joining the Guardian last year, and it’s fantastic to finally have it out in the open.
[... 839 words]It’s time for a change. Jacob Kaplan-Moss is joining Revolution Systems, who will now be offering professional Django support “to companies who need a Django expert on staff, but can’t afford someone full-time.”
Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag.
Chris Beaven's drop-in replacement for Django's {% if %} tag that adds comparison operators (less than, greater than, not equal etc) while staying backwards compatible with the less able original. I love it. This is one place where I no longer favour Django's stated philosophy: I think it's perfectly reasonable to use comparisons in presentation logic, and I've found that in my own code the lack of an advanced if tag frequently leads to pure presentation logic sneaking in to my view functions.
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. The pain of altering/ adding indexes to tables with 250 million rows was killing their ability to try out new features, so they’ve moved to storing pickled Python objects and manually creating the indexes they need as denormalised two column tables. These can be created and dropped much more easily, and are continually populated by an off-line index building process.
django-springsteen and Distributed Search. Will Larson’s Django search library currently just talks to Yahoo! BOSS, but is designed to be extensible for other external search services. Interestingly, it uses threads to fire off several HTTP requests in parallel from within the Django view.
FAPWS3-0.2 (WSGI server based on libev). Another strong contender for Python’s answer to Mongrel—3500 requests/s for static files, 43 for a simple dynamic (Django powered) pages and 4.8 for a heavy SQL query—all benchmarked with 300 concurrent requests.
The History of Python: Adding Support for User-defined Classes. Guido designed the run-time representation first, and tried to design the syntax to include as few new parsing concepts as possible. The origins of explicit self are also explained.
DB2 support for Django is coming. From IBM, under the Apache 2.0 License. I’m not sure if this makes it hard to bundle it with the rest of Django, which uses the BSD license.
Announcing django-viewtools. A really excellent idea—run ./manage.py viewtools --pdb /path/on/site/ to debug a view in your Django project that is raising an error using the Python debugger, or use --profile to run the full request cycle for that URL through the profiler.
CloudMade: A Summary of the Future of Mapping. CloudMade are now offering commercially supported APIs on top of OpenStreetMap, including geocoding, routing and tile access libraries in Python/Ruby/Java and a very neat theming tool that lets you design your own map styles. This is really going to kick innovation around OpenStreetMap up a notch.
Dulwich. A pure Python implementation of the Git file format and protocols. Reinforces my impression that a key to Git’s success is stable, well designed and documented on-disk formats.
Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. I didn’t know Google Spreadsheets could directly serve dynamic images that automatically update when the underlying data changes.
Xapian performance comparision with Whoosh. Whoosh appears to be around four times slower than Xapian for indexing and empty cache searches, but Xapian with a full cache blows Whoosh out of the water (5408 searches/second compared to 26.3). Considering how fast Xapian is, that’s still a pretty impressive result for the pure-Python Whoosh.
pytyrant. A pure-python client library for the Tokyo Tyrant binary protocol (used to access Tokyo Cabinet databases over a network). The library appears to be developed by Bob Ippolito and the team at Mochi Media.
EuroDjangoCon 2009. Tickets are now on sale for the conference, scheduled for 4th-6th of May (not March as I originally said) in Prague (followed by two days of development sprints).
Whoosh. A brand new, pure-python full text indexing engine (think Lucene). Claims to offer performance in the same league as wrappers to C or Java libraries. If this works as well as it claims it will be an excellent tool for adding search to projects that wish to avoid a dependency on an external engine.
Django Settings Tip—Setting Relative Paths. This is the first thing I do in every single one of my Django projects—it makes projects relocatable to other machines with just a couple of lines of code. I wouldn’t be at all upset to see it added to the default Django settings.py file created by ./manage.py startproject
Google App Engine: A roadmap update! Receiving e-mail, background tasks and XMPP. I predict a bunch of sites will start building small parts of their overall functionality on App Engine when some of these features land (much easier than hosting your own custom XMPP server).
jessenoller.com—python magazine. Jesse Noller has been sharing his articles originally published in Python Magazine. Topics include SSH programming with Paramiko, context managers and the with statement and an excellent explanation of Python’s threading support and the global interpreter lock.
solango. Another attempt at a Django/Solr integration library, based on code written for “a top 20 newspaper site” (I’d love to know which one). This is well documented, uses a registration model clearly inspired by the Django admin which keeps search related metadata out of your regular models and includes management commands for re-indexing and generating Solr schema.xml files.
juno. An ultra-lightweight Python web framework inspired by Ruby’s Sinatra.
Changeset 9793: SMTP testing documentation. I didn’t know this trick: running “python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025” will start up a simple SMTP server which dumps received e-mails to the terminal instead of forwarding them on.
Giant, Python Powered Robots. “They each weigh about 11 tonnes and have a 17 meter reach. The control system is written in Python, with small sections of C which run in hard-real-time to guarantee safety.”
Sharding Counters on Google App Engine. “While the datastore for App Engine scales to support a huge number of entities it is important to note that you can only expect to update any single entity, or entity-group, about five times a second”. This article explains a technique for sharding writes across multiple counters in detail, including a way to keep a memcache counter updated at the same time for faster reads.
Dive into Python 3. Mark Pilgrim’s seminal work taught me Python nearly eight years ago. Now he’s updating it to cover Python 3. It’s just a table of contents at the moment, but the chapter on “Packaging Python libraries” has me very excited.
google-mobwrite. Neal Fraser’s terrifyingly clever differential synchronization algorithm (for SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web) is now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library.
EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February.
New PylonsHQ Site Launches. The new site uses CouchDB instead of a relational database, and the code for the site is open source so you can see how it all works.
Train Crash Leads LA Times to Create Django Database on Deadline. A story from last September. I didn’t know the LA Times used Django. UPDATE: Yes I did, I introduced their panel about it at DjangoCon. Sorry, mind like a sieve sometimes.
What is django.contrib? I’d add that including a package in django.contrib is a promise that the core development team will ensure that package is updated to work with future versions of Django.