The next PyAtl meeting is on Nov. 8th. The topic this month is GUI toolkits, and the agenda calls for a bunch of lightning talks. I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to make it, since there are several toolkits on the list that I’ve never used before.
Agenda:
PyGTK 2.0: Jeremy Jones WXPython: Mark Adams PyGlet: Drew Smathers Curses: Jeremy Jones Divmod Nevow Athena: Cary Hull Tkinter: Bernard Matthews Python/Cocoa/Leopard: Noah Gift We’re still looking for someone to talk about PyQT, Jython, and IronPython.
The past several years have seen a steady increase in the use of RSS and Atom feeds for data sharing. Blogs, podcasts, social networking sites, search engines, and news services are just a few examples of data sources delivered via such feeds. Working with internet services requires care, because inefficiencies in one client implementation may cause performance problems with the service that can be felt by all of the consumers accessing the same server.
Most OOP discussions focus on GUI or domain-specific development areas, completely ignoring the workhorse of computing: command line programs. This article examines CommandLineApp, a base class for creating command line programs as objects, with option and argument validation, help text generation, and more.
Although many of the hot new development topics are centered on web technologies like AJAX, regular command line programs are still an important part of most systems. Many system administration tasks still depend on command line programs, for example.
As I write this, the Nobel Prizes for 2007 are being announced. During the week of announcements, each day includes news of another award being bestowed for outstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economics. As a technophile, the science awards have always been the most interesting to me. This year, prior to the awards, new releases of several scientific packages on PyPI caught my eye and I was struck by the coincidence.
Word came in this morning, via Brian, that Python Magazine is “viable”. That’s great news! I’ve been having a good time reading the articles (and code) you have submitted, and working with Brian, Arbi, and everyone else at MTA to put it together.
So, if you’ve been holding off on submitting your proposal for an article, or subscribing, you can stop waiting. Head over to pythonmagazine.com and take care of both today.
The functions provided are inspired by similar features of the “lazy functional programming language” Haskell and SML. They are intended to be fast and use memory efficiently, but also to be hooked together to express more complicated iteration-based algorithms.
Read more at pymotw.com: itertools
The shlex module can be used to create mini-languages using a simple syntax like the Unix shell. It is also handy for parsing quoted strings.
Read more at pymotw.com: shlex
Brian and I have been compiling a list of topics we would like to have covered in the magazine. Since we’re just starting, the field is really wide-open for anything, but sometimes it is easier to solicit articles about specific topics instead of just saying, “Write for us!”
A few of my personal wishes: We have had a couple of PyGTK articles submitted already, but nothing for any of the other toolkits.
Noah set up a group blog for PyATL members. It will be more convenient to follow announcements there than the Meetup group (do they even have an RSS feed?) though we will still need to post announcements to the python-groups blog separately. It’s sort of too bad that wasn’t set up as a planet-style aggregation, but I guess this works better to control what actually goes out on the feed and there are already 2 different planets for python blogs anyway.