Simon Willison’s Weblog

Using django.newforms with Pylons. It’s always good to see Django components used outside of the framework itself. For the record, you can avoid the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable entirely using django.conf.settings.configure (search for it). # 27th November 2007, 3:01 pm

Eventlet—Second Life Wiki. Seriously powerful non-blocking IO library for Python, currently maintained by Linden Lab as part of the server architecture used for Second Life. # 26th November 2007, 3:21 pm

Newforms, part 1. James Bennett provides a detailed description of Django’s newforms (not so new now though, they’ve been around for over a year), complete with attractive diagrams. # 23rd November 2007, 11:54 pm

Mock—Mocking and Test Utilities (via) New mocking library for Python based on the “action ... assertion” pattern (as opposed to the more common “record ... replay”). # 20th November 2007, 11:30 pm

Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears. Apparently published by Wrox in October 2007, beating the “official” Django book by just over a month. Has anyone seen this on bookshelves yet? # 16th November 2007, 9:16 pm

Django Changeset 6671. Malcolm Tredinnick: “Implemented auto-escaping of variable output in templates”. Fantastic—Django now has protection against accidental XSS holes, turned on by default. # 14th November 2007, 5:05 pm

Django Book Update. It’s done! Went to the printer on Friday, due in bookstores in the second week of December (just in time for Christmas). Congrats to Adrian and Jacob. # 14th November 2007, 12:59 am

Reinteract—Better interactive Python. Really neat Mathematica-style pygtk interactive prompt for Python, where previous lines can be edited in place and graphs and other graphical primitives can be displayed inline. Includes an elegant plugin mechanism. # 12th November 2007, 12:55 pm

Orbited: The Orbit Event Daemon. HTTP daemon designed for long-lasting comet connections, written in Python using pyevent on top of libevent. # 9th November 2007, 11:01 pm

Django documentation bookmarklets. James Bennett continues his month-long series of daily Django tutorials with documentation for one of Django’s best kept secrets: application introspection HTTP headers and bookmarklets that make use of them. # 8th November 2007, 10:59 am

Hello Revver.com 2.0. Revver, one of the more established video startups, have launched their new version which is powered by Django. # 2nd November 2007, 7:03 am

PyObjC 2.0 changes (via) All the good stuff that’s in PyObjC 2.0, released as part of Leopard. According to bbum this is the most significant release of PyObjC in 7 years. # 2nd November 2007, 6:18 am

Python on Leopard. readline is finally bundled, so the interactive interpreter works correctly without hunting around for frustratingly elusive add-ons. easy_install is bundled as well. # 31st October 2007, 5:53 pm

Django security fix released. Django’s internationalisation system has a denial of service hole in it; you’re vulnerable if you are using the i18n middleware. Fixes have been made available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91. # 26th October 2007, 9:47 pm

Using the extra() QuerySet modifier in Django for WeGoEat. You can use select() on a QuerySet to obtain extra values using subqueries. # 24th October 2007, 7:28 pm

EventScripts 2.0, now with Python. EventScripts is a plugin that lets you write scripts to customise dedicated servers for Valve’s Source engine games (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and the like). Version 2.0 adds support for Python 2.5 as an embedded scripting language. # 22nd October 2007, 11:57 pm

LastGraph. Now Available. Andrew Godwin has relaunched his LastGraph Last.fm graphing application. The new version is built on Django and S3 and uses Andrew’s Graphication graphing library based on Cairo. # 15th October 2007, 10:02 pm

/trunk/jl/scraper. journa-list.com is open source, and the screen scrapers are written in Python. # 11th October 2007, 4:10 pm

nose 0.10.0 final! Nose is my favourite Python testing tool: it can auto-discover and execute tests in a directory hierarchy, which makes it easy to run just a sub-set of your test suite. # 11th October 2007, 1:52 pm

Two months with Ruby on Rails. Good rant—covers both the good and the bad. The first complaint is the lack of XSS protection by default in the template language. Django has the same problem, but the solution was 90% there when I saw Malcolm at OSCON. # 9th October 2007, 12:23 pm

Writing An Hadoop MapReduce Program In Python. Hadoop (the open source map/reduce framework) can interact with any program that reads from stdin and outputs on stdout—so it’s trivial to drop in Python scripts for the map and reduce steps. # 9th October 2007, 11:33 am

tranquil. Inspired take on the Django ORM to SQLAlchemy problem: lets you define your models with the Django ORM but use SQLAlchemy to run queries against them. # 9th October 2007, 2:30 am

String types in Python 3. bytes are now immutable (just like the bytestrings they are replacing) and a new mutable buffer type has been introduced. # 9th October 2007, 2:08 am

Some Notes on Tim Bray’s Wide Finder Benchmark. Fredrik Lundh demonstrates some Python ninja techniques for parsing log files using multiple cores (and eventually memory mapping). # 7th October 2007, 1:06 am

DbMigration—a schema migration tool for Django. Nice and simple tool for adding schema migrations to a Django application. # 27th September 2007, 3:04 pm

lxml.cssselect (via) lxml includes an implementation of CSS 3 selectors, which compiles them to XPath expressions. Should be a useful tool for parsing Microformats from Python. # 24th September 2007, 11:57 pm

Hello JS-CTYPES, Goodbye Binary Components. Mark Finkle is porting Python’s ctypes functionality to the Mozilla platform, to allow binary XPCOM components to be defined in pure JavaScript. # 22nd September 2007, 11:57 pm

The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago... # 21st September 2007, 11:32 pm

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. # 15th September 2007, 11:36 pm