The January 2009 issue of Python Magazine is available for download now. This month’s cover feature is Creating a Collection Manager with Elixir, by Gaëtan de Menten. You have heard about SQLAlchemy, but never found the time to actually try it? Or maybe you have heard about the add-on to SQLAlchemy called Elixir, but don’t really know what it is useful for. Here is your chance to see them in action.

Ralf Schönian is translating the PyMOTW series into German. He is posting the articles on his web site as he translates them. Ralf is an active member of the pyCologne user group in Germany and author of pyVoc, the open source English/German vocabulary trainer. Thanks, Ralf!

As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, I recently moved the PyMOTW build from make to Kevin Dangoor’s Python-based build tool Paver. I had been wanting to try Paver out for a while, especially since seeing Kevin’s presentation at PyWorks in November. As a long time Unix/Linux user, I didn’t have any particular problems with make, but it looked intriguing. PyMOTW is one of the few projects I have with a significant build process (beyond simply creating the source tarball), so it seemed like a good candidate for experimentation.

The compileall module finds Python source files and compiles them to the byte-code representation, saving the results in .pyc or .pyo files. Read more at pymotw.com: compileall

Via Brandon Rhodes: This month’s Python Atlanta meeting is this Thursday, January 8th: And, I have exciting news – the chairman of the Python Software Foundation himself, Steve Holden, will be our main speaker! He will kick off our new year by giving us his own State of the Union address: in “The State of the Python Community”, he will talk about the Python community, its strengths, and its weaknesses. He will not only answer your questions about how to stay connected to the wider Python community, but will be asking you questions about how the community can be more accessible and serve you better!

I was contacted yesterday about a Chinese translation of PyMOTW. Junjie Cai (蔡俊杰) and Yan Sheng (盛艳) have started a google code project called PyMOTWCN (http://code.google.com/p/pymotwcn/) and posted the completed translations at http://www.vbarter.cn/pymotw/. My holidays were busier than anticipated, so I didn’t have a chance to continue my research into DVCS tools and hosting. I plan to work on that this month and come to a conclusion soon. I’m currently leaning towards bitbucket.

The bz2 module is an interface for the bzip2 library, used to compress data for storage or transmission. There are three APIs provided: “one shot” compression/decompression functions for operating on a blob of data iterative compression/decompression objects for working with streams of data a file-like class that supports reading and writing as with an uncompressed file Read more at pymotw.com: bz2

Following up on Brandon’s meme: The Rules: Celebrate the new year with a blog post discussing the oldest files that are still sitting somewhere beneath your home directory! The procedure is simple: Run the following script in your home directory. (You might want to use less to read the output.) Ignore files whose date does not reflect your own activity. List the oldest files in a blog post and discuss!

The long-awaited release of Python 3.0 came on December 3, 2008. This is a big step forward in the evolution of Python, as it provides an opportunity for the core developers to introduce backwards-incompatible changes to the language and libraries and break free of some past design decisions that have been deemed misguided or short-sighted. The precise nature of the changes in Python 3.0 may not be clear to anyone who hasn’t been following the progress of the release over the last couple of years, and that seems to be causing consternation in some parts of the community.

I’ve converted the build and packaging infrastructure for PyMOTW from Makefiles to use Kevin Dangoor’s Paver instead. Today’s release (1.79) is the first version released under the new build rules, so let me know if you run into problems with it.