Blue Sky On Mars

My PyCon talk, Effective Ajax with TurboGears, is now available online. The visuals for the presentation were done in TurboGears (bah! who needs PowerPoint!). The tarball for that project, plus a screencast of the presentation (recorded before PyCon) and a written version of the talk all appear on the 0.9 preview site.

I’m pleased to announce the first alpha release of TurboGears 0.9. This release has been long in coming, but there’s a lot that’s new. This release includes “widgets” for working with forms easily, the Toolbox (including the CatWalk database model browser) set of browser-based development tools, internationalization, revamped and hugely improved error handling, and an identity framework for out-of-the-box authentication/authorization. There are many improvements to TurboGears in this release. Take a look at the changelog.

This release is essentially feature-complete. I’m calling it an alpha because there are still a number of bugs to correct and the documentation needs a lot of updates and enhancements. For people who have been running TurboGears out of svn, you now have a more stable base to work from.

Many thanks to the members of the TurboGears core team, and the 40+ people who adding things large and small to this release!

Preview site:
http://www.turbogears.org/preview/index.html

Download via easy_install:
easy_install -f http://www.turbogears.org/preview/download/index.html TurboGears

Upgrade instructions:
http://www.turbogears.org/preview/download/upgrade.html

And, with this release, we’re now ready to do all kinds of neat things at the PyCon sprint next week!

gethuman cheats - the secret codes that let you talk to a human rather than an endless loop of menus.

Boing Boing: Photos: awesomely mangled English on bootlegged crap in China. It’s not all bootlegged, but a lot of it is very entertaining.

SQLAlchemy, which was announced a couple months back and has been busy in svn, has now had its first release. Congrats to Mike Bayer on that! SQLAlchemy is an object-relational database mapper that uses the data mapper pattern. This is in contrast to SQLObject and ActiveRecord which use the active record pattern. Also interesting for SQLAlchemy, is that Jonathan LaCour’s declarative layer effectively gives you active record-style mapping. The data mapper pattern works well for more complicated databases or bigger databases because it lets you be more explicit about what you want to pull from the database and how you want it to show up in your objects. That flexibility also makes it more complex for simpler tasks. That’s why I think that Jonathan’s ActiveMapper strikes a nice compromise.

Yahoo! has just released a Design Pattern Library which provides some very good guidelines for using fancy web controls, and they’ve also released their own JavaScript library: Yahoo! UI Library. The Yahoo! UI Library has a number of the same sorts of features that you’d get from MochiKit or Dojo. It’s also well-documented, which is a bonus. It doesn’t have the “pythonic” set of functions that MochiKit offers or the overwhelming completeness of Dojo, but it looks like a respectable entrant in the JavaScript library space. It also carries a BSD license, so it can be freely used for anything!

Ronald Jaramillo has put together his first “TurboGears Highlights” to bring to light some of the interesting stuff going on for those who haven’t been following the heavy duty traffic flow of the TurboGears list (1,269 members at present. More than 2,500 messages last month.)
FooManChu summarized in a detailed post how the Teach Dreamweaver and Windows to properly recognize KID files
tinyurl.com/aawu5

Jeff Marshall and Greg had put together a TurboGears-based image server/service
tinyurl.com/dnkjc

See the posted source and instructions here:
imageserver.frozenbear.com/

Max Ischenko had updated the documentation for the newly revamped DataGrid. Follow the documentation and give this useful widget a whirl.
trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/DataGridWidget

Jonathan LaCour is working on a declarative layer on top of SQLAlchemy. He calls it ActiveMapper. If you are interested in an alternative ORM for TG check out Jonathan’s work:
cleverdevil.org/svn/activemapper/
tinyurl.com/77×54

PyCon is right around the corner. If you are planning to attend, join the TurboGears Sprint. Some interesting sprint topics where discussed on this thread:
tinyurl.com/a3ojv

Get one at the CafePress store:
store.turbogears.org
tinyurl.com/9b72q

amk talks about how the Python Software Foundation is funding PyCon travellers. Since he has opened the door for me to do so, I’d like to say a big “thanks!” to the PSF for helping out with my PyCon travel. Between the conference and the looking-to-be-lively TurboGears Sprint, I’m spending a whole week in Addison, Texas. And, that’s completely on my dime, which is not a very easy thing when you’re still working on getting a business going. Or, that would have been completely on my dime, if the PSF wasn’t generously helping out.

Guy Kawasaki’s blog is fantasic. Really great reading (and only a month old!) One recent entry: The Art of Rainmaking stresses some great points about selling your product. His writing here is focused on selling some goods and getting some cash, but many of his points are applicable to selling anything: ideas, open source tools, etc.

My blog posting these past few weeks hasn’t been up to my usual standard. I’ve been in an entirely new brand of busy for me. If the level of busy-ness was measured in caffeine, I’ve had some jobs that were closer to Root Beer, most jobs along the way were like a Coke or Pepsi. Right now, I’m definitely in Jolt-land. (I’m not caffeinated myself, but it seems like an appropriate metaphor).

TurboGears 0.9 will see the light of day soon (especially with all of the work put in recently by Michele, Alberto and Max). I’ve been working on my PyCon presentation and need to put some more time into the TurboGears book. The TurboGears email list is as busy as ever (665 messages so far this month). Progress is happening on spinning Zesty News off from Blazing Things, and I hope to have more to write about that soon. I’m starting up a new project called Docudo that I’m hoping will be taken over by someone else soon. TurboGears t-shirts are for sale. As soon as is humanly possible, I’m going to be working on something new for Blazing Things. All of this, plus a recent trip to Atlanta and the daily routine helping out with things around home.

Busy as it is, I’m having a great time with work.

As some of these things land, I’ll definitely post more about them here. On my blog, this is the calm before the storm (for me, it would be more like the storm before the storm).