Nick Carroll

I stumbled across Paver, a build and deploy tool for Python applications. It will be presented at the upcoming Pycon. Looks the goods to me.

Here are a couple of good resources for configuring Vim and Emacs for Python development. I know more key-bindings with Emacs than Vim, so my preference is for Emacs, but I am certainly intrigued about trying Vim again after reading how to set it up for Python coding.

I found this great post on Python Decorators. Decorators were introduced into the python language since 2.4. The post shows the benefits of using a python decorator to improve the efficiency of a function’s runtime using memoization.

Python decorators are also extensively used in Django for authentication. For example, you can use them to decorate a view function so that only logged in users can view certain parts of your site.

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

@login_required
def my_view(request):
    # ...

The example code above shows that you only need to add the @login_required decorator above your view function to determine whether or not the current user needs to be authenticated before the view can be displayed.

I’m glad that I started playing around with Django a couple months ago. It has forced me to learn Python. I now feel more at home with Python than I ever did with Ruby. Learning Python has been especially useful with exploring Gnome’s API (as I run Ubuntu on my laptop). There are also some good editors for Python, but I quite like Gedit, and I have been messing around with writing a simple plugin that uses Exuberant CTags for navigating Python code. The Gedit plugins can easily be written in, you guessed it, Python.

There is a lot happening in the Python world, and the biggest news of late is Google’s Beta access to their new service App Engine. It is basically a service for hosting your Python applications. It currently supports any Python application that uses CGI. Essentially you can get a Django web application running on App Engine, but a bit of work will be needed to integrate with App Engine’s datastore.

Anyway I don’t want to ignite a flame war as I am a lone Pythonista in a company full of Rubyists.