Making Zend_Navigation Useful – Brandon Savage

In the last blog post, we discussed creating Zend_Navigation pages and containers. This is certainly wonderful and exciting, but the reality is that for the most part, Zend_Navigation is a pretty useless component of Zend Framework until you have a way to get the data out of the structure you’ve built. And since navigation is [...]

Stepping up to the plate

Adam Kennedy has declared a contest between Dancer and Mojolicious. Seems to me like a great idea. We’ll both get a chance to learn from each other, show our strengths and try to work on our exposed weaknesses.

One major issue about Mojolicious is th…

Malthe Borch: Frameworks in Uganda

It’s raining outside and I’ve still got half an hour to hold out for a window of opportunity. Traffic in this town is as bad as anywhere, but when it rains, it breaks down completely – traveling on two wheels is your only option. Yesterday, my boda-boda driver (the motorcycle taxi) failed to start his machine at first, and since he looked at bit young I asked him how old he was. “How can I know my age?” he replied.

As part of a charm offensive, our office has been tasked to deploy a demo application that runs on Django. It’s not WSGI, but it’s not terrible either:

$ env/bin/python demo/manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

This morning I was thinking about how much easier things are when you begin with WebOb, i.e. the raw protocol and a single layer of convenience. You’re able to focus on the application environment and without much mental effort you’re writing the beginnings of a test suite.

What I like about the BFG and Pylons frameworks is that they use this same basic foundation. You can evolve your application naturally from the just getting started phase to framework support. With Django, there’s a ton of processing required to get set up, and it’s my intuition that with all this setup, developers get late to the testing game. Test-driven development loses out to cargo-cult template-driven development.

I don’t think I’ll ever be happy on Django; I’m not even sure I buy into the notion of it being easier for beginners. Easier how? If it’s about getting started writing your first spaghetti-application, then it’s probably right on the mark. Heck, you don’t even have to learn about relational databases. But this is 2010 and there’s Scalaris and Redis and Cassandra. If I was just getting into programming, I’d want to use WebOb and one of these, throw in a URL dispatcher such as Routes or Otto.

Django seems like a platform; I think the only platform you really need is the operating system. You might benefit from a framework, but you don’t need it. Try and hold out on the framework decision and pull it down on your application only when it’s a clear benefit.

Mark Dufour: Shed Skin 0.4

I have just released Shed Skin 0.4, an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler. Thanks again especially to Jeremie Roquet for helping out.

The biggest ‘improvement’ of this release is perhaps that Windows is no longer supported. Windows users are encouraged to take over maintainership of the MinGW version, or to upgrade to a ‘real’ operating system, such as Ubuntu, and live in software freedom.

Other improvements include support for generator expressions, real boolean support (instead of integers that print as 0 and 1), support for the ‘key’ argument of ‘min’ and ‘max’, another useful type inference scalability improvement, and support for heapq.{merge, nsmallest, nlargest}. Please see the release notes for the full list of changes.

Four new example programs were also added, for a total of 47 programs:

-pylife, a game of life implementation based on the wonderful hashlife algorithm (David Bau)
-a nice a-star implementation, with a pygame frontend (John Eriksson)
-a simple game of life implementation that gave the type analysis some trouble (Francesco Frassinelli)
-a second genetic algorithm (Stavros Korokithakis)

Please go ahead and try it out, and let me know about any problems. I’m also always very happy to receive new example/test programs to play with, especially if type inference fails (or doesn’t terminate) for them!

Christian Scholz: What’s new in OAuth2.0?

David Recordon

Another IETF meeting is over and the OAuth crowd has met again! Lots of talk has been going on in the OAuth realm partly under the name of WRAP. Now what has WRAP to do with OAuth and what will happen in OAuth2.0 on which work has begun now?

In order to give us a glimpse of what is going on we have been interviewing David Recordon, co-inventor of OpenId and OAuth and now working at Facebook on Open Source and Open Standards. You can find this interview in our podcast “Data without Borders” or simply click here to get to the episode and the shownotes.

(photo by Joi Ito)

Steve Holden: Students: Help Python 3 Take Off

If you are a student you have a chance to get paid to work on Python this summer. Google is once more funding the “Summer of Code“, and once again Python is participating in the hope of getting as many students as possible to move the language’s development forwards. In fact this year the focus is on supporting the migration to Python 3 – although the “current” release of Python is 2.6.5 there is also a perfectly competent 3.1 release available, and 3.2 is shortly on the cards.

So this year the Python GSoC efforts have a distinctly forward looking flavor, and as you will see there are some amazing mentors available to help you complete your projects and earn the $5,000 that Google is offering.

Kudos to Arc Riley for once again agreeing to keep the Python show on the road as the Python Software Foundation’s education projects manager (and to C. Titus Brown for the support he lends). Come and help them repeat the successes of earlier years, move Python forward in a visible way, and become a part of the growing Python community.

Zend Framework starter kit interest? – Michael Kimsal

I’m putting together a basic Zend Framework starter kit. Right now I’ve got basic Doctrine 1.2 integration with predefined directories for schema, models, etc. Also an init process to allow for automatic injection of specified objects on to front controllers (think $this->session available in your controllers, for example).

Any interest in getting a copy of this? What other things would you like to see preconfigured or preintegrated in a starter kit?

PHP on IIS: MonitorChangesTo setting in FastCGI – Ruslan Yakushev

PHP on Windows loads its configuration file php.ini during the startup of the process php-cgi.exe. When PHP is run on IIS via FastCGI the php-cgi.exe processes are re-used to handle many requests. If configuration settings in php.ini file get updated, those changes will not be picked up by php-cgi.exe processes until the processes are recycled or restarted by IIS FastCGI module. This means that any time you change the PHP configuration you have to manually recycle IIS Application Pools that use PHP. This post explains how to configure FastCGI in IIS so that PHP configuration changes take effect right away without the need to manually recycle or restart the IIS Application Pools.

The latest releases of the FastCGI Extensoin 1.5 and FastCGI update for IIS 7.0 have a new configuration setting monitorChangesTo that takes an absolute path to a file that FastCGI will monitor for changes. In case of PHP this means that you can set monitorChangesTo to a path to php.ini file, so that any time it is modified the FastCGI module will restart the php-cgi.exe to pick up the configuration changes.

Assuming that the PHP configuration file location is C:\PHP\php.ini, the instructions below describe how to use monitorChangesTo on different IIS versions:

IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0
IIS 7.0
IIS 7.5

IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0

The FasCGI configuration is stored in a file %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiext.ini. You can manually update it to use monitorChangesTo:

[Types]
php=PHP

[PHP]
ExePath=C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe
MonitorChangesTo=C:\PHP\php.ini

Alternatively you can use the configuration helper script %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiconfig.js :

cscript %windir%\system32\inetsrv\fcgiconfig.js -set -section:PHP -MonitorChangesTo:C:\PHP\php.ini

IIS 7.0

You will need to install the FastCGI Update in order to be able to use monitorChangesTo in IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

To configure this setting, use the command below:

%windir%appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi ^
/[fullPath='C:\PHP\php-cgi.exe',arguments=''].monitorChangesTo:"C:\PHP\php.ini" ^
/commit:apphost

IIS 7.5

In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 you can use the same appcmd command as described above or you can use IIS Manager user interface for FastCGI settings:

Technical Notes

Below are the technical details that you need to be aware of when using this new feature in FastCGI module:

The file that monitorChangesTo is pointing to must exist on a file system. If it does not exist then FastCGI module will generate an error;
If the file is located on a network share then FastCGI module cannot use Windows file change notifications so it will switch to polling and will check the file for changes every 5 seconds;
If a relative file path is specified instead of an absolute path then FastCGI will assume that it is relative to the location of php-cgi.exe file.

Go Deh: Why Python?

Choose for yourself. Have a look at the examples on the Rosetta Code site. You might like to follow the links to a few pages that I did the task descriptions for as they tend to be meatier tasks, but the examples in different languages should allow you to compare how different languages are used to solve the same problems.

Unfortunately it cannot eliminate the issue of the competence of the individual programmers, but it might provide some useful info.

Have fun

Python News: Google Summer of Code: call for participation

Python is participating in the Google Summer of Code, and we welcome mentors and students! Please see the Python Summer of Code site for more details on how to participate.

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