[Baypiggies] Overview of 9/13 SnapLogic talk

[Charles Merriam]

BayPiggies Overview of September 13, 2007

Mike Pittaro, a founder at SnapLogic, spoke on "An Open Source Data
Integration Project using Python".  Slides are available as a PDF
(http://tinyurl.com/2ophj7). Mike spoke primarily about the issues
building the team, infrastructure, and installer for a large Python
project.

The SnapLogic product is a data munging and translation application
aimed at developers.  Under a GPL license, professional support and
service is available for a fee.  It has taken about one year to
develop.  Hiring Python developers was difficult, and eventually good
programmers were hired that then learned Python.   They are still
hiring.

The development infrastructure came together quickly using primarily
open source tools written in Python: mailman, subversion, trac, and
moinmoin.  The team uses both Linux and Windows (using Samba
partitions) and both Eclipse/Pydev and vi/emacs.  The build process
uses buildbot to kick of builds, epydoc and epytext for documentation,
figleaf for code coverage, unittest for testing, and (closed source)
bitrock for installation.  This led to a 11.5 Joel Score
(http://tinyurl.com/1s8w).

They learned some rules about coding standards, keeping control of
import statements, and wrapping really complex libraries with
getattr() tricks.  Mostly, they fought with the installation problems
of installation of an open source project that requires Python, C,
databases, lots of interactions, and also needs to deploy on Windows.
They are still fighting with parallelization.

Mike suggested several sources of information.  First, keep reading
the library reference over and over.  He also recommended Python Is
Not Java (http://tinyurl.com/2qyn82) and Code Like a Pythonista
(http://tinyurl.com/2cv9kg).

Thanks again to Mike for a great talk!