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Choosing a Python Web Framework I – bottling it

wizzy — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:27:47 +0000

A few years ago, when choosing a Python Web-framework with which to build Showmedo, life was a little simpler. The big CMS frameworks like Zope and its relatively user-friendly little bro Plone were reasonably well established and there were a few up and coming lighter frameworks, which promised to take one closer to the Python. Standouts here were Turbogears and Django.

I tried using Plone, even bought the book, but found it very unwieldy. Like so many frameworks it was perfectly happy until one wanted to do something outside its workflow plan. Then things got icky, really icky. There was also far too much ‘magic’ going on, and far too little connection with the underlying Python. After this experience Turbogears was a breath of fresh air. I could build a web-site in Python and leverage all the efficiency and elegance of the language up close and personal. What could be sweeter? I enjoyed the experience so much I didn’t give Django a fair crack of the whip. Although back then it was in beta and had been postponing a 1.0 release for a very long time.

Well, time moves on, and if there has been anything as intense as a framework war, it’s fair to conclude that Django has taken the spoils. Which seems fair. It’s a fantastically managed project, the documentation seems top notch (very important point), and the community is huge, enthusiastic and growing. For a more flexible experience Pylons is threatening to steal some of Turbogears thunder, offering a more modular, ‘best of breed’ alternative to Django. One of the big advantages here is the possibility of using the superb and acknowledged king of Python ORM database libraries, SQLAlchemy.

Anyway, today I come to praise something at the other end of the spectrum and newish to the field, namely Bottle.py. An entire web-framework packaged in a single Python module, which seemed crazy when first I heard of it. Bottle bills itself as a micro-framework, fast, simple and lightweight. Having had a chance to play around with it, I can testify to this. It makes a superb development server, among other things. After previous battles with Zope/Plone it’s pretty incredible to get a server up and serving pages in a few lines of Python, with one imported module. Here’s the ‘Hello World’ example:

from bottle import route, run

@route('/:name')
def index(name='World'):
    return 'Hello %s!' % name

run(host='localhost', port=8080)

So, if you fancy getting away from the complexity of the bigger frameworks and getting back to basics, Bottle.py is a great option and an amazing achievement.

In the meantime, a little selection of Python web-framework videos from the Showmedo vaults:

Eric Florenzano’s humungous series, Django from the Ground Up.

Jiang Xin’s Pylons series.

Kevin Dangor’s Ultimate DVD Turbogears set. Note: Turbogears 2 has seen some impressive changes to the framework, but much of Kevin’s presentations is still applicable.

We don’t yet have a bottle.py screencast, but there will be one soon. In the meantime, the closest to low-level web-appery we have is John Montgomery’s introduction to Python Web Programming CGI
. Note: this is a club series but the linked introductory video is free and gives an overview.

Congratulations for Dai’s 40th Scribus Video!

wizzy — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:32:21 +0000

Big kudos to Dai for adding his 40th Scribus Video to Showmedo. Judging from the feedback and Google, these are by some way the most popular Scribus screencasts on the web and a great testimony to Dai’s teaching skills and the efficacy screencasting.

You can see Dai’s Scribus collection here, and sample his 40th video below:

Relaunch, Refresh, Renew

wizzy — Sun, 23 May 2010 00:35:59 +0000

Not sure what it is, but it starts with re. Inspired somewhat by a good friend (thanks Steve!) I galvanised a few galvons and decided to redo Showmedo. Chief among the aims was:

Make navigation to the video-tutorials much easier/more intuitive.
Make the site less visually er weird/fussy/cluttered
Reorganize and refactor the codebase and remove the huge amounts of cruft behind the scenes to…
Free time in the future.
Make things faster. Page-loads, server-load, the works.
Giving the club a home.

I think pretty substantial inroads have been made with regard to these goals. Not perfect by any means, but there is now a reasonably solid base on which to build. I’ll be documenting the changes a bit in the next week or so, but hope the new site is a much nicer prospect.

Please feel free to direct any feedback here.

cheers,
Kyran

New Scribus Video Published

wizzy — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:23:57 +0000

We’re proud to publish another video in Dai’s hugely popular Scribus Desktop Publishing set. Entitled Drop Caps Revisited:

Testing wordpress-twitter plugin

wizzy — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:02:23 +0000

If this gets through, the soon to be awesomeness of this blog will be seeping through to twitter automatically. Or crashing something somewhere. Going to keep on writing to hit the 140 limit – and see what it does with that.

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New flash-player being debuted

wizzy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:24:21 +0000

It’s been much more work than anticipated (a definite screencast or three in there somewhere) but we’ve finally moved to the open-source flowplayer Chief benefits are:

much cleaner jquery-like API
far greater control over the video-player area. Which means…
innovative ways of directing users to new content and…
with luck much more interactivity with the video-player

p.s. the commenting on-site is getting a much-needed overhaul. With a bit of cookie-magic we should be able to get some dialogues going and vanquish those nasty anonymous comments (mea culpa).

Python Beginners Completed! – File Input/Output

wizzy — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:54:56 +0000

Finally we’ve finished the Python Beginners über-series in our Club. In total the Club has 118 videos over 15 series all focused on teaching new Python skills. Now we’re done with Python beginners we’ll be expanding our scope.

In just under 30 minutes in the File I/O Tutorial I cover reading text files, writing textfiles, using binary files (with Python Imaging Library as the example) and persisting data with the pickle module.

Now that we’re finished with the raw episodes and our Learning Paths are usable I’m tying together all the Python videos (free+Club) into paths-of-learning that teach you about topics including:

Starting to Program with Python
Getting Python Installed
Walking through fully-written programs (long step-by-step series)
Python development environments and tools
Python GUI development
Django
Web-application development

The learning-paths, and learning how to use them effectively, are very much a work in progress. As ever we welcome any and all constructive feedback.

Once we’re done with the Python learning paths we’ll start to tie together all the other topics in ShowMeDo (heck – we have well over 1000 screencast tutorials now!) to make learning much easier.

Visual Parallel Computing Using Python-based VISION/HPC

wizzy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:44:23 +0000

We may not know much about the future of computer programming, but one thing we do know is that it is parallel and the biggest challenge facing software programmers and hardware designers is how to exploit all those multiple cores out there.

So Unpingco’s new Python series is both fascinating and prescient. Oh and useful too.

The chief impediment to widespread usage of parallel computing is the difficulty in programming HPCs. Furthermore, most users work from a Windows PC so that learning UNIX as a prerequisite to parallel programming is a further obstruction. What is needed is a smooth workflow that simplifies both the programming task and the remote execution management. VISION/HPC is a Python-based, drag-and-drop visual-programming environment that reduces sophisticated programming tasks to dropping and connecting icons in a GUI flowchart…

`[1402] Introducing VISION/HPC‘, a video-tutorial by unpingco, part of the series `Visual Parallel Computing Using Python-based VISION/HPC‘

`[1403] An Example Using the Imaging Library‘, a video-tutorial by unpingco, part of the series `Visual Parallel Computing Using Python-based VISION/HPC‘

`[1404] An Example Using Matplotlib Library‘, a video-tutorial by unpingco, part of the series `Visual Parallel Computing Using Python-based VISION/HPC‘
.

Scientific and Parallel Computing Using IPython

wizzy — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:09:15 +0000

Wearing my research-scientist’s hat I can honestly assert that Python’s strength in scientific programming is one of its glories, and maybe less appreciated than it should be. That makes series like unpingo’s
Scientific and parallel computing using IPython pure gold for its target audience. Combining the power and flexibility of the enhanced IPython interpreter with some of the industrial strength Python scientific, numeric and graphing libraries creates a superbly flexible and efficient scientific programming set-up. Check out these vids, rather superb as ever.

The series has five videos:

Introducing and setting up IPython on a Windows PC
Getting around and using the IPython interpreter
Using on-line documentation for a short case study on computing integrals
Subclassing and using the Python language for scientific computing
Using doctest and docstrings in customized classes

Videos Rolling In

wizzy — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:24:24 +0000

Neil Dickenson’s fantastic Assembly Programming Series continues apace, focussing on the stack.

A nice little video from Dai on using the Nautilus file-browser to do Linux admin tasks.

In just over a minute Ian shows how to install the increasingly necessary firefox adblock plugin. Very slickly done as always. As ever, adblocking is subject to a little debate. The garish, obnoxious ads that destroy ones browsing experience are self-defeating anyway so blocking them isn’t an issue, but more benign, relatively peaceable text-based ads should probably be allowed through if there’s any chance it will help maintain the flow of quality content.

Some really nice 3D modelling and texturing videos from Horst and Leo, using the rather cool Wings3D open-source modeller, a simpler alternative to the rather more heavyweight Blender. As ever Horst and Leo helpfully provide an English-subtitled version.

Incoming C++ Videos

wizzy — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:45:27 +0000

We have a huge C++ series coming in, courtesy of antiRTFM – C++ Tutorials – Absolute noob Spoonfeed. As a C++ programmer from way back, it’s great to see these videos at Showmedo. Yisroel has really created something rather special, 30 videos which aim to gently lead you through the initial steps of what is a relatively difficult language. The videos were designed for the smaller YouTube format but work well within that constraint. Although the terser and friendlier scripting languages such as Python are starting to make big inroads in software development, there are still times when the raw speed of C++ and its ability to connect to the machine at a lower level make it the right tool for the job. So check out this rather cool set and leave some nice feedback.

15 New Learning Paths (mostly for Pythonistas)

Ian — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:17:47 +0000

We’ve published 15 new Learning Paths to help you build your knowledge of Python, C and Screencasting. The Paths mix free and Club content in a guided journey, pulling out exactly the right episodes and series to help you complete your knowledge for a particular subject.

Popular Paths include:

If you like the idea of these guided tutorials, please give us feedback and help us to spread the word by blogging and tweeting (@showmedo).

New Screencast Tutorial Learning Path

Ian — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:36:36 +0000

In the Learning Paths section we’ve added a new Screencast Tutorial. The tutorial covers techniques, applications (for Windows, Mac and Linux) and how you can upload your screencasts into ShowMeDo.

Showmedo Relaunching

Ian — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:41:03 +0000

Frantic scenes aboard the SS Showmedo as we move to a new server and introduce a much-changed site. According to google analytics about one third of our regular audience are currently lost in cyberspace as various DNS caches around the globe send them off to the old site or some weird fusion of old and new.

Moving server has been as stressful as I imagined, probably the reason for all those ‘moving servers is stressful’ blog entries around the web. We’re currently a little rickety and scared to crank up the engines for fear of shaking the ship apart. But, thanks to some caching magic, we seem to be serving pages and videos.

The new site design is the result of finally having a big chunk of hours to dedicate to Showmedo, rather than cadging them after hours from the day-job. I think things are a deal cleaner and more professional, allowing for my being rather an accidental web-developer. The feedback has been pretty positive, which is always nice.

Our new initiative viz web-education is Learning-paths. I’ll be blogging a little about this as soon as I manage to get the server software installed. For all you linux users out there used to the simple pleasures of ‘apt-get install’ or ‘yum’ or ‘rpm’ or any one of the new-fangled ways of getting software onto your *buntu, opensuse, fedora, etc. box, be very thankful; I have been plunged back a couple of decades or so to library-dependency hell and it is a head-trip indeed.

UK Government Turns To Open Source

Ian — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:57:57 +0000

Given the UK government’s historic love of all software solutions proprietary, the news that Open Source solutions are now to be actively sought for and encouraged is significant indeed. Possible reasons for this volt-face are the collapse of more than a few high profile proprietary IT projects and a general need for belt-tightening as the current economic woes hit goverment revenue hard. Or maybe they just discovered Showmedo and realized the game was up More details from our very own BBC here.

Who Blogs the Blogmen?

Ian — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:50:08 +0000

Blogging about our freshly themed, recently resuscitated blog seems more than a tad redundant but it has been poorly and someone has to announce its recovery. It should look more at home with the new Showmedo site, courtesy of some wordpress-theme-fuery, which turned out to be slightly less painful than all that but which will be the topic of a screencast one of these days.

Re-theming the blog gave me (Kyran) a chance to peer under the Wordpress hood, install it (and Apache) locally and generally play around a little. Gotta say I’m impressed, even the little amount of PHP hackery being very bearable. Wordpress is a real shining star in the open-source firmament and I haven’t yet managed to break it, so it’s a few notches ahead of Showmedo. So thanks to all the relevant parties for creating this little joy and we fully intend to use it quite a bit more in the future.

And if anyone has any Wordpress screencasts lying around or a vague idea of making one sometime, I think they would go down huge, so to speak. For a slightly aging, but very nice introduction to Wordpress 2.0, checkout Rachel Cunliffe’s screencast.

ShowMeDo up and running on new server

Ian — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:26:05 +0000

This is a test message that confirms that the blog is working. ShowMeDo.com came up on a new server a week back, we’re still configuring a few parts and expect full service over the next week.

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ShowMeDo is on Twitter

Ian — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:44:47 +0000

If you’re a twitter user, we’re now announcing our open-source tutorial screencasts at http://twitter.com/showmedo. This will include all the Python videos, along with Inkscape, GIMP and everything else.

Twitter makes it easier to push out lite announces rather than writing longer blog posts on ShowMeDo’s regular blog (though of course we’re still blogging, but just as occasionally as before!).

Making Python math 196* faster with shedskin

Ian — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:45:02 +0000

On my personal blog I have written a long entry on Making Python math 196* faster with shedskin.

I compared stock Python 2.5, Psyco and ShedSkin output on an artificial neural network problem. The goal was to quickly estimate how fast a C version might solve the problem without having to actually write C (thus saving hours, sweat and tears). ShedSkin converts Python code to C++ for compilation with g++.

Psyco speeds things up by a factor of 2.6, ShedSkin by a super-impressive 196 times.

Leonardo Maffi has continued the benchmarks and shows that hand-coded C is between 1.5 and 7 times faster than ShedSkin’s output. Auto-generated code that is within a order of magnitude of hand-written code is darned impressive in my book!

He also notes the difficulty of writing a bug-free C version vs the simplicity of dealing with Python (and D) code.

As a side note – Mark Dufour and team at ShedSkin are interested in having extra hands help with the push to a 0.1 release which supports enough Python to be useful to many.

‘How I Screencast’ by Florian

Ian — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:13:40 +0000

Florian, one of our authors, has written a blog on how ‘How I do my screencasts‘.

“…I log into my tutorial account and start making the screencast, with recording on. It has to be noted that I have no second monitor showing me the code I am supposed to write, so I pretty much write it from memory. With longer screencasts I might have a paper with notes lying next to me. …”

His method is probably shared by most screencasters, though editing tends to follow (at least for me) to clean-up the recording, remove empty space and smooth out any audio glitches.

“Batteries Included” Python beginner Club series now finished

Ian — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:54:18 +0000

Lucas’ Club series for Python beginners which introduces the Python standard library is now complete.

Batteries Included – The Python Standard Library has 9 episodes for Club-subscribers which introduce the core elements of file-system access, using the shell, regular expressions, math, dates and talking to websites.

“I will thank you for getting this in-depth basic explanation of the basic modules. It really fills in some missing holes on my knowledge of using this.” – JZA

Each video is around 5 minutes long and includes examples of normal use.

Episodes:

Series overview
The “sys” module
The “os” module
The “shutil” module (shell access)
The “glob” module (file pattern matching)
The “re” module (regular expressions)
The “math” module
The “urllib2” module
The “datetime” module

Other recent Python videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development, Python for Math Education, Database Programming, Google App Engine and pyWin32

New Club videos for “Batteries Included” series on The Python Standard Library

Ian — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:55:56 +0000

Lucas Holland joins Kyran, John and Ian as an author for ShowMeDo’s Club. The Club creates tutorial videos for beginner and intermediate Python programmers.

For his first series Lucas covers elements of The Python Standard Library.

Half of the videos are published, the series will be fully published in the next two weeks. Each video is around 5 minutes long and includes examples of normal use.

Episodes:

Series overview
The “sys” module
The “os” module
The “shutil” module
The “glob” module
The “re” module [forthcoming]
The “math” module [forthcoming]
The “urllib2? module [forthcoming]
The “datetime” module [forthcoming]

Other recent Python videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development, Python for Math Education, Database Programming, Google App Engine and pyWin32

New Club series for Python Beginners – Common Variables and Containers

Ian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:04:50 +0000

I’m rather excited to announce this new and rather long Club ShowMeDo series called Common Variables and Containers. It is aimed at new/intermediate Python users and builds upon the previous ‘What Does Python Look Like?‘ series.

In 14 episodes I introduce the user to all the common Python datatypes and containers. This includes showing common usage and explaining newer ways of doing things with Python 2.5 (and linking to examples of out-dated docs so the user is aware of older techniques).

“Excellent tutorial – Well thought out example, clear, with a logical progression that builds on itself. In the end the goal of the tut is attained very well.”

Each episode is 5-10 minutes long, the first seven are published and the rest follow over the coming weeks:

The aim of the series is to give a visual introduction to all the common datatypes that the user will see when learning Python. This backs-up the material that can be found on the web and in books – screencasts are great for building up memories of ’seeing it in action’.

This series is a part of Club ShowMeDo, these videos are for paying subscribers (Club membership is given for free to anyone who submits their own screencast). The Club screencasts are a part of our 311 Python screencasts, most of which are freely available, created by us and our open-source authors.

“Great video, lots of good basic information to help me start learning Python. Easy to watch the videos and then open up an interactive prompt and try out the new features I just learned. I also like the web links for additional details.”

If you want to try the Club, remember that we offer a full refund guarantee if the Club isn’t what you expect and you are free to cancel your subscription at any time. We want you to feel comfortable whilst trying us out. We’re always open to feedback and suggestions for the topics you’d like to see us cover.

Other recent Club videos include Database Programming, Google App Engine and pyWin32.

Recent free videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development and Python for Math Education.

Two more ‘Beginning Python’ episodes posted

Ian — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:49:31 +0000

Continuing from the last post we’ve published two more Club ShowMeDo videos in the first Python Beginners series named What Does Python Look Like?

The current four (of six) episodes are:

There are two more episodes to come, they’ll be posted next week. After that a much longer Python Beginners series starts, this one will cover all of the basic datatypes including usage examples.

Learn Google App Engine with ShowMeDo

Ian — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:03:10 +0000

Kyran has published the first five episodes of A Gentle Introduction to the Google App Engine Python SDK in Club ShowMeDo, more will follow over the coming weeks.

“Google has chosen Python as its initial application development language, allowing new users to leverage the considerable power and usability of such frameworks as Django or Pylons. This series will introduce the GAE, focussing on the use of its Python SDK and webapp framework. …”

This series currently looks at: