DFW Pythoneers: 4th Saturday Meeting THIS Sat

[Jeff Rush]

Although it is Memorial Day weekend, we're going to hold a meeting at
Nerdbooks as usual.  I've checked with the owner and the store is open, and
hopefully some of you will show up, although I've not heard many replies as to
whether you will/won't make it.

As a result of work on the Forrester survey, we've got some source examples,
designed to be clear and easy to understand, for us to walk through.

  - A mashup by Martin of placing temperature readings collected from
    one site using REST, onto a DFW Google map.

  - HTML page generation using Twisted Nevow/STAN, along with an RSS
    feed parser module to embed a list of the N most recent news stories.

  - Simple but powerful presentation and form validation using the
    Gizmo(QP)   framework, which does the validation both in the server
    *and* in the browser using JavaScript.  No big deal, until you
    realize the JavaScript in the browser is generated from the Python
    source, and the whole source fits on a couple of screens.

  - An RSS feed reader that pulls down all images linked to, from one
    of those photo sites, and the source is 15 lines of Python.

  - A cool module, NamedTuples, from the Python Cookbook site.

  - A couple of small programs that apply the screenscraping module
    "BeautifulSoup" to the task of extracting the set of mailing list,
    and associated archives, from a Mailman website.

And if we need more, I've got PyFUSE, a Filesystem in Userspace in Python,
where you can overlay a filesystem metaphor over your database, website or
existing filesystem -- think autobackup-on-write.  It looks quite powerful.

And a silly program I whipped up one night to play with some Lisp-like atom
ideas, where you can have bound and unbound names, without a lot of quoting
syntax.  A bit strange but small and introduces a new use for property
descriptors.

Hope to see you there, and bring your own topics or questions, along with your
laptops.  We may not get to everything but swimming in everyone's 'lightning
talk'-like ideas is fun.

Time and Place:

  Nerdbooks.com in Richardson (see the website for directions)
  2pm until 5pm

Oh, and all but the FUSE source examples are already in our club subversion
repository, under the Projects/ directory.  You can find a link to browse the
source through the web at http://dfwpython.org, in the menu on the left.

Jeff Rush
DFW Pythoneers Organizer