1,069 items tagged “python”
The Python programming language.
2008
UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.
minidetector. Neat piece of Django middleware that adds a “mobile = True” attribute to the request object if the request’s user-agent matches a list of strings of known low-power browsers in mobiles, PDAs or game consoles.
This Week in Django. After 33 episodes Django’s usually-weekly podcast finally has its own website.
Keyczar (via) New open source cryptography toolkit from Google, designed to get algorithm selection, key rotation and versioning right so you don’t have to. Java and Python versions are available; the Python version depends on PyCrypto.
Django snippets: RequestFactory. I’ve been wanting this for ages; when I finally got around to writing it it turned out to only be a dozen or so lines of code. Makes it easy to create mock request objects in Django, which you can then use for testing view functions directly (bypassing the current test client mechanism which requires views to be assigned to a URLconf before they can be tested).
Changeset 8266—Added ModelAdmin.save_model() and ModelAdmin.save_formset() methods. One of those small changes that opens up enormous possibilities—it’s now incredibly easy to customise exactly how a model is saved in the Django admin interface by over-riding the save_model method.
GeoDjango Documentation. Merged to Django trunk a few hours ago. The tutorial isn’t there yet, but the rest of the docs are worth exploring.
My Universal Feed Parser was conceived as a weapon against what I considered the gravest error of XML: draconian error handling. Recently, someone asked me to implement a switch that makes it not fall back on lax parsing in the case of an XML wellformedness error. I said no, not because it would be difficult to implement, but because that defeats its entire reason for being.
simple-thrift-queue (via) Phillip Pearson’s surprisingly concise in-memory message queue written in Python using Facebook’s Thrift library (which is similar to Protocol Buffers, but was open sourced much earlier on). Handles 4,000 requests per second on a laptop.
PDFMiner. Useful looking PDF parsing library in Python—can produce an XML representation of the text and style information in a PDF document.
Changeset 8162. “Implemented a secure password reset form that uses a token and prompts user for new password”—also sneaks base36 encoding and decoding in to Django.
Super User Conditional Page Exception Reporting. The name is almost as long as the code snippet: this serves Django’s debug page to logged in super-users, falling back to the default 500 template for everyone else.
Spawning + Django. The latest version of Spawning (a fast Python web server built on top of the Eventlet non-blocking coroutine networking library) can run Django applications out of the box, using threads and processes to work around the blocking nature of the ORM’s database drivers. Eric Florenzano reports better performance than Apache and mod_wsgi, and is now hosting his site on it.
DjangoCon & Django 1.0 updates. DjangoCon tickets will be released in two batches of 100. The first set will be available at 12 noon UTC on Thursday July 31st; the second set will be released at 6pm UTC on Friday August 1st.
Extra fields on many-to-many relationships (via) Checked in just over an hour ago, Django now lets you specify a custom “through” table for a ManyToManyField. Great work by Eric Florenzano.
FLOSS Weekly 34: Django. Randal Schwartz interviewed Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON for the consistently excellent FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Dojango version 0.3 released. A reusable Django application that provides Dojo, helper functions (dojo.data integration) and tools for switching between Dojo versions.
Python BoF and Django Drinkup (via) At OSCON? Come along to the Jax Bar tonight (Tuesday 22nd) from 7pm to 10pm to hang out with fellow Pythoneers and Djangonaughts.
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.