This year's Language Summit took place on Wednesday March 7 in Santa Clara, CA before the start of PyCon 2012. As with previous years, in attendance were members of the various Python VMs, packagers from various Linux distributions, and members of several community projects.
Articles, Tutorials and Talks
At PyCon this year, David Beazley gave a fantastic keynote talk on Tinkering with PyPy. It is a must watch for everyone.
There were lot of great talks at PyCon this year and the videos are available online. The AV core crew did a fantastic job of recording and posting these videos online very quickly. You should check them out.
pandas is a Python library providing fast, expressive data structures for working with structured or relational data sets. In this talk, Wes McKinney discusses the library's features and show a variety of topical examples.
This presentation introduces methods with which to create your own clients, tools, and test cases using the Python programming language. The goal is to put testers closer to the conditions in which they are testing for and arm them with the necessary resources to be successful. It also discuss interfacing with current tools that people commonly use for web application testing. This allows for pinpoint identification of specific vulnerabilities and conditions that are difficult for other tools to identify.
Source code modification can be useful in a number of testing and analysis scenarios. This post looks at how you can modify Python source code using the ast module and some tools where this technique is used.
This post shows you a quick recipe on how you can validate a post/zip-code when you only know the country at runtime.
This article explores using the boto library to work with resources in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss put together this awesome cheat sheet that was handed out in the swag bag at PyCon 2012. You can get it online now.
How would you handle high traffic demands and little time or funding for your site? One option is to save every page generated by a database-backed site as a flat file and then host them all using a static file service like Amazon S3. This is where django-bakery, which is a set of helpers for baking your Django site out as flat files, comes in handy. This approach is suitable if your site is all read and no write.
With Aculab Cloud, Python developers are able to build a range of telephony applications, whilst taking full advantage of the flexibility and scalability that a cloud-based platform affords. This ia a step by step guide to the Python API for Aculab's cloud-based telecom platform, where you can build from answering a call to setting up conferences, call transfers, whole call recording, message playback and record etc.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Waitress is meant to be a production-quality pure-Python WSGI server with very acceptable performance. It has no dependencies except ones which live in the Python standard library. It runs on CPython on Unix and Windows under Python 2.6+ and Python 3.2. It is also known to run on PyPy 1.6.0 on UNIX. It supports HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.
Py2D is an utility library for creating vector-based games with Python. It is designed to be API-agnostic so you should be able to use it with pygame, pyglet or something completely else.
Lightbulb is a Git-powered, Neo4j-backed blog engine for Heroku written in Python.
PyPedia is a collaborative programming web environment. Each article in this wiki is a function or class or any other piece of Python code. No need to import anything. Just call the function or instantiate the class that belongs to any other article.
If want all of the PyCon videos on your iPhone for offline viewing, use the this Python script to fetch pycon videos from YouTube and convert them to M4V format so they can be imported to iTunes.
It is a port of web2py libraries to Bottle, Flask, Pyramid, Tornado, and Wsgiref with examples.
Bombolone is a tasty Content Management System for Python based on Flask, MongoDB, Tiramisu and Designed based on html5 boilerplate and Twitter bootstrap.
Lamson is a pure Python SMTP server designed to create robust and complex mail applications in the style of modern web frameworks such as Django. Unlike traditional SMTP servers like Postfix or Sendmail, Lamson has all the features of a web application stack (ORM, templates, routing, handlers, state machines, Python) without needing to configure alias files, run newaliases, or juggle tons of tiny fragile processes.
New Releases
The biggest improvements in IronPython 2.7.2 are: support for loading libraries from zip archives (the zipimport module), the sqlite3 module, many improvements to the pyc.py compiler, such as the ability generate standalone executables by embedding the IronPython assemblies and numerous other bug fixes.
Upcoming Events and Webinars
This talk will present a few ideas about how we can use graph storage to closely mirror real world structures in web applications that in turn only need to lightly reflect the underlying data. It will offer examples through the medium of fantasy games like Morrowind, Fallout and Skyrim. Through a mixture of gaming geekery, reactive programming and data modelling we hope to offer a vision of a graph-based more webby future.
There will be a presentation; Django Templating: More Than Just Blocks.
This book teaches you computer programming in the Python programming language. Each chapter gives you the complete source code for a new game and teaches the programming concepts from these examples.
Each standalone chapter in this book introduces techniques for mining data in different areas of the social Web, including blogs and email. All you need to get started is a programming background and a willingness to learn basic Python tools.
