Blue Sky On Mars

• Process Impact — Goodies for Software Peer Reviews and Software Inspections
  (tags: software tools inspections review Development)
• Codestriker: Homepage
  (tags: review Software development tools)
• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile
  While Stevey misses the point that most businesses can’t operate the same way Google does, this is still full of great insights about just what it is that Google does.
  (tags: programming agile development management xp)
• In-Browser Wireframe Prototyping with Frametastic
  (tags: javascript design webdesign)

MICHIPUG (the Michigan Python Users Group) will be meeting on a special day for October: Tuesday, October 3rd. The meeting will be at 7PM as usual, at the Arbor Networks office in downtown Ann Arbor, as the September meeting was.

We changed the day so that Titus Brown, author of Twill, could come and talk about testing topics with us. We’re hoping that Jason Pellerin, author of Nose, will also be there.

In addition to Titus’ talk, we also have Bruce Webber talking about wxPython.

Quite a meeting lined up! I hope to see you there!

o3: The Open Source Enterprise Data Networking Magazine, a free, polished online magazine available in PDF form now has issue 5 up. Issue 5 has two articles about TurboGears: an introduction that I wrote, and an article about scaling by the guys at FrozenBear (creators of diggdot.us). Check it out! (And pay attention to the ads, if you’ve been thinking about the TurboGears Ultimate DVD.)

• InfoQ: Testing Ajax Applications with Selenium
  (tags: Ajax Selenium Testing javascript web tdd development tools)

Tucked away in this the press release about their participation in Ohio LinuxFest, you’ll find this mention of the new TurboGears AppStack from Spliced Networks:

TurboGears is one of many open source projects that Spliced Networks has packaged into a new solution called AppStacks. Designed to work with any Linux operating system, and Apple’s MacOS X Server, AppStacks are highly secure and optimized server appliance solutions.

Preconfigured, secure server environments seems like a great thing to sell, because there are a lot of components required to get these things right.

Do say hi to John Buswell and crew at Ohio LinuxFest. As I mentioned the other day, Mark Ramm will also be at their booth this weekend, so you can pester him with your TG questions

Nope, the book’s not out yet (though the writing is complete and we’re going through edits now). However, you can find good stuff about TurboGears in print in two places.

I’m tardy reporting on the first one. This is from Japan and I’m not sure if you’d call it a book or a magazine. It doesn’t have ads, but it’s also not as long as a typical book. Whatever you call it, it’s very interesting:

As you can see from the interesting character’s surfboard, this is a “Lightweight Languages” magazine. I wish I could read Japanese, because it looks amazingly interesting, with articles covering 5 different web frameworks that are in use today.

Luckily, I have no trouble reading the second recent appearance of TurboGears in print:

The October 2006 issue of Linux Magazine (at newsstands now) features an article by Mark Ramm which provides another good introduction to TurboGears.

If you’re just getting up to speed about TG or want to read more about it, check these out! Also, be sure to say hi to Mark if you’re at the Ohio LinuxFest this coming weekend. He’ll be at the Spliced Networks booth.

• PR Leap - Free Press Release Distribution to Major Search Engines - Beta
  (tags: marketing business)

• Trading Hours For Dollars « John Chow dot Com
  (tags: business money career entrepreneurship)

• Pyd: Connecting D and Python
  D is an interesting looking language. It looks a bit like the Java you’d like to have (type inference, native
  associative array syntax), but it’s native compiled and runs nearly as fast as C with much less overhead than Java. It’s made all the more inter
  (tags: python d programming)
• Mercurial binary packages
  Windows and Mac premade Mercurial packages with extra fixes beyond the current release.
  (tags: mercurial windows mac)

Christopher Lenz announced a new version of Genshi a couple of days ago. Genshi is the template language that was formerly known as Markup. A good way to think about it is that it’s Kid 2.0. The latest version includes a feature I was wishing for in Kid: plaintext templating. Take a look at the doctest for it:

>>> tmpl = TextTemplate('''Dear $name,
...
... We have the following items for you:
... #for item in items
...  * $item
... #end
...
... All the best,
... Foobar''')
>>> print tmpl.generate(name='Joe', items=[1, 2, 3]).render('text')
Dear Joe,

We have the following items for you:
 * 1
 * 2
 * 3

All the best,
Foobar

This uses all of Genshi’s infrastructure, so the kinds of expressions and things that you’re used to when generating HTML and XML will still work here. HTML and XML definitely remain Genshi’s forte and if you’re not generating those formats at all, you’d likely want to choose a different language. (You can get higher performance when you don’t care about document structure…)

Genshi builds on Kid’s template language with flexible includes via xinclude, template matching via XPath expressions, much better error reporting and better performance to boot. The Trac project is currently in the process of converting over to Genshi, and it’s in plan that TurboGears will convert to Genshi in TG 1.1. (You can, of course, use Genshi now with TurboGears, and you’ll certainly be able to continue using Kid.)
Genshi owes a lot to Kid’s original design, but it has definitely moved the state of the art forward a good deal.