http://www.pythonware.com/daily/ Daily news from the Python universe, presented by your friends at Secret Labs. Current guest editor is Hamish Lawson. http://lwn.net/Articles/38472/ 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. http://great-er.intevation.org/sciparam/ SciParam validates scientific parameters entered in wxPython user interfaces. http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.html 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. http://www.python.org/2.3/ http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=7590 "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." http://www.conflux.ee/ "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." http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=85362 pynum2word converts numbers to words; it supports a number of different languages and styles. http://www.hole.fi/jajvirta/weblog/20030715T2101.html "Congratulations to Fredrik Lundh for receiving the Frank Willison award for outstanding contributions to the Python community." http://zephyrfalcon.org/weblog/arch_d7_2003_07_12.html#e283 "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." http://www.postal-code.com/mrhappy/blog/archives/000030.html 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. http://pydev.sourceforge.net/ "Pydev is a project to create a complete Python development environment for Eclipse: syntax highlighting, outline view, code navigation, debugger integration." http://www.artima.com/intv/tipping.html "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." http://activestate.com/Corporate/Communications/Releases/Press1057770084.html 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. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=7589 "After being offline longer-than-expected, I can finally post my blog entry on last week's Open Source Conference." http://www.luga.de/pytone/ 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. http://www.python.org/2.3/ http://scribus.planetmirror.com/about.html Scribus is a deskop-publishing program for Linux. It uses Python as its scripting language. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2003/7/17/pythonnews.html The O'Reilly Network features an article on the design of the BitTorrent file-download system, which is written in Python. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6821 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." ftp://www.tummy.com/pub/tummy/Python/filterinput/ filterinput is a fileinput-like module with a few changes to make it easier to write filters. http://vb2py.sourceforge.net/ 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. http://www.hole.fi/jajvirta/weblog/20030703T1601.html "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." http://www.raelity.org/archives/computers/programming/python/text_processing_in_python.html 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." http://www.hole.fi/jajvirta/weblog/20030708T1601.html "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." http://pype.sourceforge.net/ 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. http://www.linuxjournal.com//article.php?sid=6988 Linux Journal has an introductory article on LDAP programming, using Python and the python-ldap library for examples. http://www.pycs.net/sqr/categories/slicesOfPy/2003/07/08.html#a100 Dean Goodmanson explores the possibilities of Pippy (Python for PalmOS) on a wide-screen AlphaSmart Dana as a programming teaching tool. http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2003-06-01_2003-06-30.html This is a summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list from June 1 2003 through June 30 2003. http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/2003/07/08.html "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." http://www.reportlab.com/toolkit/index.html 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. http://arrowtheory.com/software/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. http://toulouse.amber.org/archives/2003/07/08/logging_introspection_formatting.html "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." http://sourceforge.net/projects/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." http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/16146 "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." http://pyirc.tuxfamily.org/ 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. http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/09/1549236.shtml?tid=126&tid=156&tid=172 "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. http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/07/06/2253222.shtml?tid=126&tid=156 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." http://www.a-a-p.org/ 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. http://www.artima.com/intv/typing.html "Bruce Eckel talks about why he prefers Python's latent type checking and techie control of language evolution." http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/~dblank/pyro/ "Pyro is a library, environment, graphical user interface, and low-level drivers to explore AI and robotics using the Python language. "