Zope

Focusing on Plone's strengths of security, usability and community - the article also contains an overview of many government organizations who are using Plone effectively today. It is a must read for those involved in government, as well as a solid ... [More] piece on why governments are choosing Plone for their public face. You can read the full article here. [Less]

Sometimes I'm a bit late to the party: This morning I was thinking about checking how much of my code is really covered by my tests. So I searched the f* web for how to run python coverage.py on Zope. Turns out it's already in there, ever since somet...

The membership vote was a close one between two strong and diverse proposals, leaving the board in the enviable position of knowing that either choice would give them an excellent venue and strong team organizing the event in that location.Simples ... [More] Consultoria and Menttes with support of Associação Python Brasil and Plone Cono Sur made the proposal of a conference in São Paulo, Brazil.The winning proposal, of San Francisco, was made by Elizabeth Leddy and Tom Kapanka. The selection of the San Francisco bid will result in the Foundation taking on more responsibilities for the event than in previous conferences - something the board acknowledged in their deliberations.The annual conference will be held in late October 2011, with initial information about the conference going out in the next few weeks. This will be the first time the conference has been held in the US since 2008 in Washington, DC. The 2009 conference was held in Budapest, Hungary; while the recent 2010 conference was held in Bristol, UK.Calvin Hendryx-Parker, President of the Plone Foundation thanked both groups for their strong and well-supported bids. "It's a shame we can't have two conferences, particularly in light of the strides being made by the Plone community in South America." [Less]

I was reading this article about linkfluence moving from CouchDB to Riak "Why we move away from CouchDB We were already aware of Riak before we started using CouchDB, but we weren’t sure about trusting a new product at this point, so we decided ... [More] , after some benchmark, to go for CouchDB. After the first couple of months, it was obvious that this was a bad choice. Our main problems with CouchDB is scalability, versionning and stability. Once we store a document in CouchDB, we modify it at least twice after the original write. Each modification generates a new version of the document. This feature is nice for some use-cases, but we don’t need it, and there’s no way to disable it, so the size of our databases started to become really important. You’ll probably tell me “hey, you know you can compact your database ?”, and I’ll answer “sure”. The trouble is that we never managed to get it to compact an entire database without crashing (well, to be honest, with the last version of CouchDB we finally managed to compact one database). The second issue is that one database == one file. When you have multiple small databases, this is fine. When you a have only a few databases, and some grow to more than 1TB, the problems keep growing too (and it’s a real pain to backup). We also had a lot of random crashes with CouchDB, even if the last version was quite stable." Does that sound familiar, fellow Zope developer? I know a lot about ZODB but little about CouchDB. One thing that a lot of people don't know about ZODB is that it's very fast and I think this is true about CouchDB too. Speed isn't the same as a raw speed of inserts/queries because with the concurrency variable added the story gets a lot more complex. It's the exact same perspectives I've always had on ZODB: 1) It's really convenient and powerful 2) It being a single HUGE file makes it hard to scale 3) Versioning can be nifty but it's often not needed and causes headache with the packing 4) It works great but when it cracks it cracks hard and cryptically [Less]

I was reading this article about linkfluence moving from CouchDB to Riak "Why we move away from CouchDB We were already aware of Riak before we started using CouchDB, but we weren’t sure about trusting a new product at this point, so we decided ... [More] , after some benchmark, to go for CouchDB. After the first couple of months, it was obvious that this was a bad choice. Our main problems with CouchDB is scalability, versionning and stability. Once we store a document in CouchDB, we modify it at least twice after the original write. Each modification generates a new version of the document. This feature is nice for some use-cases, but we don’t need it, and there’s no way to disable it, so the size of our databases started to become really important. You’ll probably tell me “hey, you know you can compact your database ?”, and I’ll answer “sure”. The trouble is that we never managed to get it to compact an entire database without crashing (well, to be honest, with the last version of CouchDB we finally managed to compact one database). The second issue is that one database == one file. When you have multiple small databases, this is fine. When you a have only a few databases, and some grow to more than 1TB, the problems keep growing too (and it’s a real pain to backup). We also had a lot of random crashes with CouchDB, even if the last version was quite stable." Does that sound familiar, fellow Zope developer? I know a lot about ZODB but little about CouchDB. One thing that a lot of people don't know about ZODB is that it's very fast and I think this is true about CouchDB too. Speed isn't the same as a raw speed of inserts/queries because with the concurrency variable added the story gets a lot more complex. It's the exact same perspectives I've always had on ZODB: 1) It's really convenient and powerful 2) It being a single HUGE file makes it hard to scale 3) Versioning can be nifty but it's often not needed and causes headache with the packing 4) It works great but when it cracks it cracks hard and cryptically [Less]

A new PSF project aims to create professional quality promotional material about Python. The first goal is to create a brochure to showcase the many ways Python is used. It will include use cases to highlight the ways the language allows users to ... [More] accomplish their tasks both in educational and in professional settings. Project team members Marc-André Lemburg, Jan Ulrich Hasecke, and Armin Stross-Radschinski created this Plone marketing brochure for the German Zope User Group. It is the inspiration for this new project. Community feedback and awareness is vitally important for the success of this initiative, mainly to gather information to be used in the brochure. We are especially looking for interesting projects that can be discussed as use-cases. If you have any suggestions for information to include in the brochure, please contact Marc-André Lemburg or send an email to brochure AT getpython DOT info. UPDATE: more information about the brochure, including a newsletter, can be found here. [Less]

A new PSF project aims to create professional quality promotional material about Python. The first goal is to create a brochure to showcase the many ways Python is used. It will include use cases to highlight the ways the language allows users to ... [More] accomplish their tasks both in educational and in professional settings. Project team members Marc-André Lemburg, Jan Ulrich Hasecke, and Armin Stross-Radschinski created this Plone marketing brochure for the German Zope User Group. It is the inspiration for this new project. Community feedback and awareness is vitally important for the success of this initiative, mainly to gather information to be used in the brochure. We are especially looking for interesting projects that can be discussed as use-cases. If you have any suggestions for information to include in the brochure, please contact Marc-André Lemburg or send an email to brochure AT getpython DOT info. [Less]

The Plone Foundation Board of Directors has announced the selection of four new members of the Foundation. The new members are: Thomas Desvenain of Ecreall in Lille, FranceVincent Fretin of Ecreall in Lille, FranceGabrielle Hendryx-Parker of Six Feet ... [More] Up in Fortville, Indiana (USA)Elizabeth Leddy from San Francisco, California (USA) The Plone Foundation is the organization formed in 2004 to serve as a supporting organization for Plone and its community. Members of the Foundation are chosen by the Foundation's Membership Committee on the basis of merit - specifically that they have made significant, enduring contributions which benefit the general Plone community.The Foundation is happy to welcome Thomas, Vincent, Gabrielle and Elizabeth as members! [Less]

After a lot of work, and several delays, the book is finally done, approved and available! You can buy it from it’s page on CreateSpace. The book covers Migration strategies Preparing for Python 3 Porting with 2to3 Common migration problems ... [More] Improving your code with modern idioms Supporting Python 2 and Python 3 without 2to3 conversion Migrating C extensions Extending 2to3 with your own fixers Language differences and workarounds Reorganizations and renamings   And it has a foreword by Python guru Brett Cannon! It’s published on CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, so it will be available on Amazon as well in the near future, but if you buy it from Amazon, they charge me twice, so it’s better if you buy it directly from CreateSpace. CreateSpace has in general worked well, and I intend to write a blog post of the self-publishing experience in the near future. Filed under: plone, python, python 3000, python3 Tagged: book, createspace, self-publishing [Less]

This is the third in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. The first post introduced the series and discussed the ... [More] Django virtual track. The second post focused on the web working virtual track. This post focuses on the third virtual track, Python and NoSQL. Python and NoSQL One of the more interesting developments in the past couple years is the use of NoSQL databases. FOr many years, the default answer to any kind of persistence problem was simply to put it in a (relational) database. If you had problems scaling, then you would shard or pay lots of money for clustered/big iron solutions. NoSQL developed in part as a reaction to the overuse of RDBMSes for all sorts of problems. Of course, it can be hard to say exactly what NoSQL is - but I like to define it as a resurgence of "the right tool for the job," just applied to the storage and persistence space. It can be graph-based, document-based, column-based, or object based -- or even just a data structures server. It is not surprising, though, that Python is able to talk to them all. In this track we have four different talks, giving the inside scoop on production-level use of various NoSQL stores. ZODB: A Python Persistence System by Chris McDonough. The ZODB is the granddaddy of the various NoSQL options for Python, having been developed when such things were "object databases" and not "NoSQL." Nevertheless, the ZODB is a standalone persistence system uniquely integrated into Python that remains astoundingly buzzword-compliant despite its age. This talk will provide a high-level overview of ZODB useful to a novice or intermediate Python programmer. At the end of the talk, an attendee should have a basic understanding of how to create an application which depends on ZODB persistence. CouchDB and Python in practice by Luke Gotszling. CouchDB has a unique document-centric model with automatic clustering and replication. It is gaining a lot of traction, and has recently been seen both up in the clouds and as a data store on Android phones. This talk will introduce CouchDB and will show how to get it to play well with Python. Luke will continue by showing a python ORM for CouchDB, easing development and object-document interoperability. Finally, Luke will cover parsing CouchDB documents within python, writing view functions in python, map/reduce functions on CouchDB from python, and some lessons learned from managing and distributing a live deployment at scale under high load. Scaling Python past 100 by Mark Ramm. Those with eagle eyes will spot this as a repeat from the "web working" track. That is because this talk is a twofer - describing both the development of the modern Python codebase as well as the use of MongoDB to address the scaling issues associated with a top 100 site. MongoDB + Pylons at Catch.com: Scalable Web Apps with Python and NoSQL by Niall O'Higgins. The Catch.com backend provides an API for publishing and querying your personal data - used by many hugely popular Android, iOS and Web clients. Faced with the limits of the initial Catch.com Java/BDB backend implemention, they evaluated various alternative technologies including Amazon SimpleDB, MySQL, Cassandra and MongoDB. They found Python and MongoDB gave them unique flexibility with our data model, allowed them to scale for increased reliability and performance and decreased feature development time - and in this talk they'll describe exactly how.Edit: Wesley Chun points out that Running Django Apps on Google App Engine is also designed to deal with NoSQL datastores - and that the principles covered in his talk apply both to GAE and to MongoDB. ed. Is this the conference you want to see? Then, register for PyCon and book your room now! We have picked up a few more rooms - including a few at a lower rate a block away. You can email ([email protected]), or phone (847-759-4277). We have very few spots left. Links: Go to Part 1 of this series Go to Part 2 of this series Go to this post on the PyCon site. Edit: Discussion link on Hacker News. [Less]