The object-oriented scripting language
Ars Technica posts: Chandler, an open-source personal information manager, hits its first public release. “Chandler, the brainchild of the first Macintosh programmer, Andy Hertzfeld, has hit its first “usable” public release milestone. Is this an application worth watching?”
YES! An open-source, secure PIM written in Python, runs cross-platform, backed by Mitch Kapor, partly written by Andy Hertzfeld. What’s not to like?
Slashdot asks Do LUGs Still Matter?, pointing to an article by Joe Barr, writing for NewsForge. The answer for all UGs hasn’t changed: User Groups matter if they matter to you. If there’s something you want out of a LUG and you’re willing to put some effort into a LUG, amazing things can happen. Everyone knows of a LUG that’s faded: there’s a natural rhythm to LUGs like all organizations. A leader with fire in his/her belly drives the group to new heights, burns out or gets distracted, and the group declines. A new leader may emerge or the group may fade away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but an empty web page or two.
The Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group is on another power climb, not its first, nor hopefully its last. Active volunteers are running chapters in Nashua, Peterborough, Hanover, Concord and Durham. A Python Special Interest Group shares many of its members and the groups resources and gives us a presence in Manchester as well.
In the past year, member of the group were present at Linuxworld Boston, the Software Association of New Hampshire InfoeXchange annual conference, the Hosstraders ham radio swapfest, the McAuliffe annual teacher’s conference, and Software Freedom Day.
LUGs can matter as much as you want them to.
In “Dabo Part I: The AppWizard,” Andrew Ross MacNeill interviewed Ed Leafe in a videocast demonstrating the Python n-tier framework dabo. Ed was so impressed with the power of video presentations that he’s tried his hand at it himself. Check it out at http://leafe.com/screencasts/codedemo.html. Ed used dabo on a Fedora Core 2 workstation and recorded it using pyvnc2swf and Sound Studio on the Mac. Very cool!
Ten-time Microsoft MVP Ed Leafe and Fox/Wine/Python guru Paul McNett have been working on a Free (price and license) framework in Python to create data-intensive rich client applications that will run on all major platforms (thanks to Python) and support all major databases.
On his ProFox mailing list, Ed Leafe announces Dabo reaches another milestone:
If you had to give one reason why Fox rocks, what would it be? The UI and reporting tools are good, but there are other products out there that do those things as well or better. The language is OO and can be quite elegant, but it is also procedural and can be quite ugly. And DBFs are not exactly the ultimate data store around.
No, if I had to name the killer feature, it would be this: an internal data engine. With this, you can do things that other languages simply cannot. You can pull a data set from SQL Server or Postgres, and then manipulate that data quickly and powerfully, using Fox’s SQL engine as well as its Xbase commands. You can select a subset from that cursor, and then join that subset to another cursor. All in Fox, and all natively.
This was the piece that Dabo lacked, and that I felt would take it from a second-rate data framework to a first-class product. Well, I’m thrilled to announce that Dabo now has such an internal data engine! Data in Dabo is held in objects called DataSets, but which are very much like Fox cursors. These DataSet objects now understand SQL, allowing you to send it any valid SQL statement and get back the results in another DataSet object.
http://dabodev.com/wiki/DataSet
Congratulations, Ed! This is a really exciting step! Fox Rocks because it has a rich development environment, a powerful means of iterative development using the command window, and a very capable local data engine for cursor manipulation. With the integration of SQLite (via pySQLite) into the data layer, Dabo developers can still use the backend data of their choice and have a powerful local engine for manipulation, the best of both worlds.
The Python Special Interest Group (http://www.pysig.org), a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (http://www.gnhlug.org) had it’s monthly meeting last Thursday at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH.
Kent Johnson put on a very good presentation and demonstration of Jython, complete with working demos, sample code and handouts. Everyone from novice to journeyman practitioner walked away with a better appreciation of what Jython is (simplifying, a Python interpreter/runtime written in Java) and what it isn’t, when to use it (working in a Java environment or wanting to use Java-based library functions). Great job, Kent! I’ve posted some notes from the meeting as well as Kent’s notes to the PySIG wiki at http://www.pysig.org/pywiki/PyNotes20051027.
Nearly a dozen people attended at the Amoskeag Business Incubator (thanks to them for the free space and projector), including new attendees brought in by Bill Sconce’s recent appearance at the ACM/IEEE seminar series and from my posts to the SwaNH lists. See, PR works!
On his Hentzenwerke Publishing website, Whil Hentzen says, “Reserve April 21-24, 2006 for a trip to Milwaukee. That’s all I can say right now. Trust me.”
Yeah, right. Wonder what he’s up to…
I’ll bet April in Milwaukee is almost as nice as the Novembers we’ve spent there at GLGDW…
The Python Special Interest Group (“PySIG”) of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the fourth Thursday of each month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester at 7 PM.
This month, the meeting will take place on Thursday, 27 October 2005 and will feature a presentation on Jython by KentJohnson.
“Kent is soliciting suggestions for specific topics (on the PySIG mailing list). In the meantime here’s a synopsis about Jython in the large from the project’s home page: http://www.jython.org/docs/whatis.html. Jython should be of interest to anyone who uses or wants to know about either Python or Java. I particularly like the “typically 2-10X shorter” part, having worked on Java projects in a former life…” — Bill Sconce, PySIG coordinator
LLoyd Kvam of Venix Corporation will host a discussion and demonstration on Functional Programming at the next Python SIG meeting, held the fourth Thursday of each month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator.
At last night’s PySIG meeting at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Kent Johnson announced that he’ll be teaching a course on Programming in Python for beginning programmers for the Merrimack Schools Adult Ed program. At $120 for 10 nights of two hours each, it sounds like a bargain. Unfortunately, I’ll be teaching LAMP at the NHTI Center for Training and Business Development, otherwise, I might attend myself.