Blue Sky On Mars

raze has what appears to be a number of the things you’d normally grab from the Cookbook, all packaged together.

This week, Amnesty International’s irrepressible.info campaign website (developed by the folks at Soda) was simultaneously Slashdotted and Observed (the Observer being a popular UK paper) and lived to tell the tale. The irrepressible.info campaign is all about human rights and freedom on the net.
Also, some news that I forgot to blog a couple weeks ago. Diggdot.us recently appeared in MacWorld as one of the go-to sites for geeks.

It’s great to see these successful sites with TurboGears under the hood.

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Let the cholesterol jokes begin! TurboGears.org has served more than 200,000 eggs. (Do Python Eggs even have cholesterol?)

I’ve just put up a new screencast showing how easy it is to use JavaScript libraries that have been packaged as TurboGears widgets: Using JavaScript with TurboGears. This screencast actually shows off a few things:

• Using a widget (obviously)
• How widgets include the necessary JavaScript
• The widget browser in the TurboGears Toolbox
• How cool setuptools/Python Eggs are (I start from not even having the widget package installed).

This shows off setuptools, because I used the Lightbox widget, which in turn requires the Scriptaculous widget. Without any additional configuration, the widgets show up in the widget browser. easy_install and go!

The TurboGears project has been fortunate to have a number of great contributors. We have had a number of excellent code contributions and contributors, but we’ve also had people give us support on the mailing lists, documentation and visuals.

I’m very thankful to have Richard Standbrook, Ronald Jaramillo, Karl Guertin and others helping keep TurboGears visuals on track. Richard has even helped out with my TurboGears Ultimate DVD by providing a DVD slip case design:

It’s good looking work that fits well with the new TurboGears.org site. I’m looking forward to holding one of these in my hands. The disc heads off to manufacturing on Thursday morning, so there’s still a couple days left to get your order in and your name (or even your logo) in the credits. (After Thursday morning, the credits options obviously go away. The preorder prices will also climb a bit. The products are expected to start shipping on June 16th.)

Mike Bayer and others have been involved in a pretty significant rejiggering (that’s the technical term) of SQLAlchemy. Much of the common user API is unchanged, but some of the pieces have become considerably more flexible. Additionally, Mike has rolled out a new site: SQLAlchemy - The Database Toolkit for Python

SQLAlchemy has a strong community, which provides patches and updates on a regular basis. Included with SQLAlchemy are several user-supplied extensions, including ActiveMapper, SqlSoup and SelectResults. SQLAlchemy is involved in a high-profile integration with TurboGears, is growing in popularity within the Zope community, and is under evaluation to be the underlying database API used by Trac.

So, in answer to Eliza’s question, according to the SQLAlchemy web page, TurboGears is indeed looking at SQLAlchemy

Beyond just looking at it, TurboGears already features SQLAlchemy integration (and work is underway to ensure that TurboGears works properly with the latest releases of  SQLAlchemy).

When Phillip Eby works on something that has “head-exploding” properties, it’s worth paying attention to see why he’s putting forth the effort: PyCells and peak.events. Sometimes these things look academic and not useful in reality, and I’ve seen responses along these lines to TurboGears’ use of Rule Dispatch. Really, though, this looks quite valuable for certain kinds of problems in certain kinds of systems.

Word is just starting to spread about the TurboGears Ultimate DVD (and the tin and squishy Toolboxes and the MarbleGears), so I’m quite happy with the response I’m seeing so far. A couple interesting bits so far:

• Sales outside the US outnumber sales in the US. Ronald Jaramillo, who is personally responsible for the general coolness of the TurboGears Toolbox (the software one), placed the first order. Denmark, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland and the UK at least have all put in appearances. If I was doing the shipping myself, I’d have a lot of Customs Declarations forms to fill out!
• A majority of people buying the DVD have opted to pitch in some extra money to help out and get their names in the credits. Thanks!
• I’ve sold at least one of every product. I wasn’t sure if people were going to go for the extras. With only one squishy Toolbox sold, though, there is a possibility that I’ll be left holding 149 of them

There’s no way to predict how well the whole presales period (which goes until 6AM EDT, June 1) will go based on the early sales. Thanks to everyone who has made the leap thus far!

I don’t know Portuguese, but apparently Claudio Torcato has made a couple of TurboGears example apps (I saw the mention of widgets in there, as well). The cool thing is that I spotted these in the Cheeseshop. It’s nice seeing people registering their work!