Daily Python-URL

2003-07-26

Stéfane Fermigier: EuroPython 2003 conference report, day 2 [Stéfane Fermigier reports on his second day at the EuroPython 2003 conference, covering unit testing with Zope, Icoya, PyQt, his own talk on the Collaborative Portal Server, and Guido's keynote.]

Thomas Koester: SciParam [SciParam validates scientific parameters entered in wxPython user interfaces.]

Joerg Budischewski: PyUNO [OpenOffice.org 1.1 includes PyUNO, a generic bridge between Python and OpenOffice.org's component model, UNO (Universal Network Objects). It enables a Python program to drive a running OpenOffice.org instance, and allows UNO components to be implemented in Python.]

2003-07-25

Barry Warsaw: Python 2.3c2

Python 2.3c2 is the second and last release candidate for Python 2.3.
There have been a bunch of bug fixes and memory leak plugs since the
first release candidate, but no new features.  As described in PEP 283,
Python 2.3 final will be released before the end of July 2003.  We are
planning for Tuesday 29-Jul-2003 if everything looks good.

We highly encourage everyone to rigorously test this release candidate.
Only critical bug fixes will be allowed from here to the final release,
but we want this release to be as stable as possible.

Highlights since rc1 include:

- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
  data bytes before the zip compatible archive.  Zipfiles containing a
  comment at the end are still unsupported.

- Fixed leaks in pyexpat and locale, and a long standing bug in the
  parser module.

- The MacOSX build is now built with -mno-fused-madd to fix
  test_coercion on Panther (OSX 10.3).

Aahz: Typing: Strong vs weak, static vs dynamic ["With the advent of languages such as Python, the debate over typing has heated up again. Contrary to some claims (notably from Bruce Eckel), I believe Python has strong typing, and this article explains why."]

Inversion Software: Cònflux Lite ["Cònflux Lite is an open-source groupware and file-management system. It uses the common web browser as its user interface to achieve the access-anywhere functionality. ... Cònflux Lite is written in Python using the Apache2/Python integration module mod_python and uses the PostgreSQL database as a back end."]

2003-07-24

Taro Ogawa: pynum2word [pynum2word converts numbers to words; it supports a number of different languages and styles.]

Jarno Virtanen: This week's featured superhero: Fredrik Lundh ["Congratulations to Fredrik Lundh for receiving the Frank Willison award for outstanding contributions to the Python community."]

Hans Nowak: The importance of being selfish ["Some people don't understand the usage of 'self' in Python OO. That's fine, many people initially don't, especially those who come from C++ or Java. However, even after reading the FAQ they not only still don't understand it, but they also spout nonsense about self 'being added for backward compatibility' and 'Python didn't start out as an object-oriented language'. 'self' is not just a good idea, it's also necessary."]

2003-07-23

Chris Cummer: Python under OS X [After having Python recommended by a couple of developers he respects, Chris Cummer decided to see what it would take to get Python 2.3 running under Mac OS X. 45 minutes later he had finished writing his first Python program: a bare-bones text-only web browser.]

Aleks Totic: pydev ["Pydev is a project to create a complete Python development environment for Eclipse: syntax highlighting, outline view, code navigation, debugger integration."]

Bill Venners: A conversation with Bruce Eckel, Part IV: Python and the tipping point ["Bruce Eckel talks with Bill Venners about how Python's minimal finger typing allows programmers to focus on the task, not the tool, generating a productivity that makes more projects feasible."]

2003-07-22

ActiveState: 2003 Active Award winners [ActiveState presented 2003's Active Awards at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Conference. In the Python category the Programmers' Choice award went to Mark Hammond, author of many of the Windows extensions for Python and coauthor of the COM framework and extensions; while the Activators' Choice award went to Martin von Löwis' for his doggedness and quiet determination in dealing with some of the most unrewarding yet crucial tasks in Python's development. Also the Programmers' Choice award in the XSLT category went to Uche Ogbuji and Mike Olson, developers of the Python-based 4Suite XSLT framework.]

Guido van Rossum: OSCON 2003 impressions ["After being offline longer-than-expected, I can finally post my blog entry on last week's Open Source Conference."]

Jörg Lehmann: PyTone 2.0.0 [PyTone is a music jukebox written in Python with a curses-based GUI. While providing advanced features like crossfading and multiple players, special emphasis is put on ease of use. Version 2.0.0 improves the listing features, provides support for the new ossaudiodev in Python 2.3, is more easily customized, and allows multiple instances to be networked together.]

2003-07-21

Jeremy Hylton: Python 2.3c1

I am very happy to announce the release of Python 2.3 release candidate
1.  The python-dev crew has fixed almost 50 bugs since the beta release
last month.  You can find the downloads at the usual place:
http://www.python.org/2.3/

All major reported bugs have been fixed for this release.  If we do not
discover any major bugs in the next week, we will re-release this code
as Python 2.3 final.  We encourage potential users of Python 2.3 to try
the release candidate with their programs and report any bugs as soon as
possible.

To report a new bug, use the SourceForge bug tracker
http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?func=addbug&group_id=5470

This release of Python does not have any big changes, but it does
have many small changes that improve the libraries, fix bugs, and
increase stability.  According to some simple benchmarks, Python 2.3
is 25-30% faster than Python 2.2.3.  There are about 15 new or
significantly revised standard library modules, and a few new
builtins.

Franz Schmid: Scribus [Scribus is a deskop-publishing program for Linux. It uses Python as its scripting language. ]

Stephen Figgins: BitTorrent style [The O'Reilly Network features an article on the design of the BitTorrent file-download system, which is written in Python.]

2003-07-19

Linux Journal: CMF for Zope [The print edition of the July 2003 issue of Linux Journal has a feature on the Content Management Framework for Zope. "If your web site uses free software exclusively, you might not realize how big of a deal CMF for Zope really is. Proprietary content-management systems have high-priced licenses and still require you to do substantial customizing. This might be the article that makes you a web hero at work, so pay attention."]

Sean Reifschneider: filterinput [filterinput is a fileinput-like module with a few changes to make it easier to write filters.]

Paul Paterson: vb2Py [The vb2Py project is developing a suite of conversion tools to aid in translating existing Visual Basic projects into Python. The translated projects make use of PythonCard.]

2003-07-16

Jarno Virtanen: The language (almost) without curly braces ["Angelika Langer wants to know what's to come in the world of programming languages, and what is the next 'curly brace' language to revolutionarize the programming world, since Java and C# didn't do it."]

Rael Dornfest: Text Processing in Python [In the course of discussing David Mertz's book 'Text Processing in Python', Rael Dornfest shares some of his thoughts about Python. "I'm seeing ever more Python in the social software space. Its suitability to the task of converting napkin pseudocode to equally-readable running code and focus on there simply being at least one reasonable way to do things (as opposed to the Perlish TMTOWTDI) means its often quicker for a social software programmer-to-be to pick up and prototype an idea without all that $_@%# gobbledegook."]

2003-07-15

Jarno Virtanen: Help Jython ["Jython is an amazing piece of software, I must say. I have been fiddling and twiddling with all sorts of Java modules in my day job, and Jython just makes my life a whole lot easier. ... But the thing is that there has always been a bit of a shortage of core Jython developers, and lately things have been even worse."]

Josiah Carlson: PyPE (Python Programmers Editor) [PyPE (Python Programmers Editor) is intended to offer a lightweight but powerful editor for those who think Emacs is too much but Idle is too little. It features syntax highlighting and tabbed multiple documents. PyPE uses wxPython.]

2003-07-14

Ryan Kulla: LDAP programming in Python [Linux Journal has an introductory article on LDAP programming, using Python and the python-ldap library for examples.]

Dean Goodmanson: AlphaSmart Dana and Pippy [Dean Goodmanson explores the possibilities of Pippy (Python for PalmOS) on a wide-screen AlphaSmart Dana as a programming teaching tool.]

Brett Cannon: python-dev summary for 2003-06-01 through 2003-06-30 [This is a summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list from June 1 2003 through June 30 2003.]

2003-07-11

Tom Yager: If I don't understand it, neither do you ["I confess to all of blogdom that I was all wet about Python and Cocoa. I take refuge in the politician's defense: I cannot be held accountable for acting on knowledge I lacked at the time. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to re-read Python and Cocoa In a Nutshell, respectively."]

ReportLab: ReportLab Tookit 1.18 released [Version 1.18 of the ReportLab Toolkit for PDF generation has been released. Main changes: improvements to pyRXP which can now be used in 16bit mode; tables now can have row and column spanning; renderPM can now do PICT images; more charts and improvements to existing graphics classes.]

Simon Burton: hYPerSonic [hYPerSonic is a Python/C framework for building and manipulating sound-processing pipelines. It is designed for real-time control and includes objects for oscillators, filters, file IO, soundcard and memory operations.]

2003-07-10

Jeffrey Shell: Logging, introspection, formatting ["A look at using Python's pprint module with a logging system (zLOG is used in this example) to dump readable data structures to program logs."]

Just van Rossum et al: FontTools ["FontTools is a library for manipulating fonts, written in Python. It supports TrueType, OpenType, AFM and to an extent Type 1 and some Mac-specific formats."]

Doug Tillman: Python boosts JAR file auditor functionality ["A Python port of a Java jar file auditor is cleaner in its implementation and more complete in its auditing capabilities. This article presents the Python port, discusses its advantages, and highlights some of the great Python features that allow you to produce robust functionality with minimal code."]

2003-07-09

Sylvain Hellegouarch: PyIrc [PyIrc is a Python library for Internet Relay Chat. So far it implements RFC 1459, part of RFC 2812, and the DCC/CTCP protocol. Gtk and Qt clients are also provided.]

Slashdot: Guido van Rossum leaves Zope.com ["Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python programming language, announced at OSCON last night that he's leaving Zope.com to work for a new startup called Elemental Security, founded by Dan Farmer (known from several security tools such as Satan)." Guido will continue to lead Python's development.]

Also see:
python-dev: Moving to California
zope3-dev: Goodbye

Ursus Maximus: Book review: Text Processing in Python [Slashdot features a review of David Mertz's book 'Text Processing in Python'. "If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book."]

2003-07-08

Bram Moolenaar: Aap 1.0 released, cash awards offered [Version 1.0 of Aap has been released. Aap is a tool that is designed to make it easy to locate, download, build and install software. To help make the next version more powerful, faster, reliable and simpler to use, a number of cash awards are being offered.]

Bill Venners: A conversation with Bruce Eckel, Part III: Type checking and techie control ["Bruce Eckel talks about why he prefers Python's latent type checking and techie control of language evolution."]

D Blank, L Meeden, D Kumar: Pyro - Python robotics ["Pyro is a library, environment, graphical user interface, and low-level drivers to explore AI and robotics using the Python language. "]

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