Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

People sure are excited about the Google App Engine. Especially people who have some other favorite language besides Python. A significant number of the issue tracker items are of the form “Please add support for $MY_LANGUAGE”, where $MY_LANGUAGE might be VB.NET, C#, PHP, Java, Groovy, Ruby, Perl, etc. ad nauseam.

I’m not going to comment on the language-wars aspect.

But if you want your language supported (this goes for any issue in the tracker in fact), the thing to do is not to go to one of those issue pages and add a comment that consists of “+1”. (“DUGG!!” is also not recommended.) That sends an email to everyone who has “starred” the issue. An email that consists of “+1”. With your name on it.

A former colleague from my days in print design (and a wonderfully loyal reader of my blog to boot) writes to ask whether he should learn Python. He’s a smart guy with a deep background in typography, publishing, and the Mac. He is not a programmer by trade, but has taught himself enough PHP to build a custom CMS for his newspaper. He writes:

I’ve invested so much time in PHP, and am quite proficient now (not bad for it being more of an avocation), but I respect your opinion and for a long time have wondered about switching.

OK, this is an ugly hack. But also (possibly) cool if you’re into ugly hacks.

I’ve written a small Python script that is a fully functional, self-contained, self-starting Django application. You don’t need to put it on your PYTHONPATH or set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. You don’t need a web server. It even creates some dummy content for you. I call it jngo.py – it’s somewhat compressed.

The only prerequisites are a Unix-like operating system (i.e. I couldn’t tell you how to make it work on Windows), SQLite and a working install of Django trunk. It is fully “Works on My Machine” certified.

Shared hosting is starting to feel pretty quaint in the face of cheap and easy virtualization, but I still have some clients who use it. While doing some maintenance work today on one client’s Pair.com account, I started to twitch when I realized I was about to make some changes without using version control. I checked for Bazaar, Mercurial, and darcs command-line binaries; only darcs was installed, luckily a fairly recent version (1.0.8). Problem solved.

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or “trunk” in svn-speak). There’s an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I’m making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick’s blog doesn’t allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project “was in no way a solo effort”, there’s no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.