Simon Willison’s Weblog

mod_wsgi 1.0 Release Candiate Available. mod_wsgi is shaping up to be an excellent alternative to mod_python. # 26th July 2007, 8:21 pm

Mozilla and IronPython: IronMonkey. Interesting to note that all three new Mozilla projects are being lead by experienced Python developers. # 26th July 2007, 8:07 pm

Instant Django. Portable Django environment for Windows, no installation required. Can also be run from a USB thumb drive. # 24th July 2007, 6:49 pm

Django Master Class. Notes and slides from the OSCON tutorial I gave yesterday with Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeremy Dunck. # 24th July 2007, 3:20 pm

Undelete in Django. Inspired by the conversation about undo the other day, Nathan Ostgard created a simple solution based around custom managers and a trashed_at model field. # 20th July 2007, 6:54 pm

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data. # 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm

Logic in Templates. I don’t think it would hurt Django to have a bit more support for conditional logic in templates, but I wouldn’t go as far as supporting the ability to call Python functions directly. # 19th July 2007, 8:35 am

ThingDB. Another extensible key/value pair data store, constructed for the Open Library based on Aaron Swartz’s Infogami technology. # 17th July 2007, 10:21 am

Python Tuples are Not Just Constant Lists. “The index in a tuple has an implied semantic”. # 17th July 2007, 7:53 am

lwqueue. Lightweight cross-language message queue system, written in Perl with client libraries in Perl, Python and Ruby. # 16th July 2007, 10:04 am

Partial OpenID provider implementation from idproxy.net. It’ll take a while to package up provider support for django-openid, but in the meantime here’s some partial, incomplete, poorly documented example code ripped from idproxy.net. Hopefully this will give people trying to figure out the JanRain Python library a bit of a leg up. # 12th July 2007, 6:48 pm

gSculpt. Powerful open source modelling software, written in Python and demonstrated (to much applause) as the last lightning talk of EuroPython 2007. # 11th July 2007, 11:48 pm

pybraces. I didn’t know this was possible: a source level filter implemented as a custom -*- encoding: braces -*- # 11th July 2007, 2:48 pm

Bazaar/Avahi mDNS Plugin. Adds ZeroConf support to Bazaar, so you can “bzr share” a branch over the local network and “bzr browse” to discover shared branches. Designed for sprints with a local network but no internet access. # 10th July 2007, 10:17 am

PyCon UK 2007. The weekend of the 8th and 9th of September, currently accepting talk submissions. I’ll be running a Django tutorial session. # 10th July 2007, 9:42 am

Storm. New Python ORM from Canonical, emphasising multiple database support, intelligent local cache invalidation and a thin layer over the underlying SQL. # 9th July 2007, 8:44 am

Interview with Leah Culver: The Making of Pownce. Django + Perlbal + S3 + AIR. # 7th July 2007, 10:05 pm

The Django Web Application Framework. I’m slowly pushing my presentations from the past couple of years up to Slideshare. This is a Django talk from April 2006, so it’s a little out of date. # 5th July 2007, 1:07 am

PyMOTW: subprocess. Better documentation for the swiss army knife of process control tools. # 4th July 2007, 10:18 am

Web hosting landscape and mod_wsgi. Graham Dumpleton explains how mod_wsgi’s daemon mode should provide secure Python deployment for commodity hosting providers. # 2nd July 2007, 3:47 pm

dnspython. Python DNS toolkit—seems like the kind of thing that should be in the standard library. # 1st July 2007, 11:55 am

Python, Mac OS X, and Readline. This worked for me, though you need to already have gcc and svn installed. It’s crap like this that made me switch to Ubuntu on Parallels for most of my Python development. # 30th June 2007, 10:24 pm

Python 3000 Status Update. Doesn’t look like we’ll get multiline lambdas, but the other stuff looks great. I’m not looking forward to years of Python 2 and Python 3 co-existing and splitting the community though (ala PHP 4 and 5). # 19th June 2007, 1:49 pm

Mac OS X Leopard: UNIX. Leopard ships with DTrace, and it’s been hooked in to Java, Ruby, Python and Perl. # 11th June 2007, 11:05 pm

google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python. # 9th June 2007, 6:15 pm

Wait For It (via) Neat WSGI middleware from Ian Bicking that launches a thread for every incoming request and watches for slow responses; if something is taking too long it returns a “please wait” page to the user and polls for completion. # 9th June 2007, 4:53 pm

Talking to the internal GPS in my N95 from Python. Thanks to a new LocationRequestor module for Python Series 60. # 6th June 2007, 10:31 am

start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more. # 5th June 2007, 6:05 pm

’tie’ considered harmful (via) Rich Skrenta on the disadvantages of abstractions like Perl’s tie, which lets you create hash data structures that aren’t actually hashes. Operator overloading (as seen in Python) suffers the same problems. # 30th May 2007, 11:11 pm