[Chicago] February Meeting

[Kumar McMillan]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Brian Ray <bray at sent.com> wrote:
> It's that time again...
>
> Who has something interesting to present?  A couple random thoughts:

wow, I'm a little intimidated by that list of topics.

One thing to point out is that this will be our 2nd-to-last last
meeting before PyCon -- where did the time go?!  I'd love to get some
feedback and practice for my upcoming PyCon talk, Strategies For
Testing Ajax.  It does not address the number 42 in relation to Python
but might be interesting to anyone working on Ajax websites.  It will
be about 30 min.

_

Strategies For Testing Ajax

As a web developer you are probably familiar with the paradigms of
testing simple web applications. Your test case makes a GET / POST
request, your program responds with an HTML page, and your test
verifies the HTML elements. Unfortunately, today's typical web
application is not so simple! Since modern browsers support
asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) very well, the HTML response might
deliver program code to run on the client's web browser. The browser's
runtime environment would then interact with your server-side program
(Python, Ruby, Java, etc) and you now have a big problem: How does
your test suite cover both server-side functionality and client-side
functionality?

This talk will use a real Ajax web application (backed by Python) as
an example then offer practical strategies for creating a fast,
scalable test suite to help ensure that each release of such an app
works as intended. It goes beyond just the tools and technologies; it
examines architectural strategies -- how and when to use stubs, how to
design a testable UI, etc -- so that as your application grows in
size, your tests remain fast and effective.

>
>  * Should we ask Brantley to expand on his lightining talk people loved so
> much.
>  * I think It would be nice to have a meeting dedicated to Ian Bicking and
> his contribution to ChiPy/Python in the near future.
>  * We need to work in more language features in our meetings
>  * What should we be doing concerning PyCon at ChiPy meetings
>  * What does the number 42 have to do with Python, anyway?
>  * Now we are starting to have more scientists in the crowd, should we cater
> some topics in the scientific realm?
>  * We covered Python on Mobile, what about python for pure GIS?
>  * What does accessing shared memory have to do with Python and multi-core
> systems, anyway?
>  * What do these modules have in common and where do I get: hotshot, pickle,
> optparse, urllib, pdb, inspect, subprocess, array, tempfile, heapq
>  * Topics we have covered in the past that may be worth revisiting: testing,
> packaging python projects, graphing, gui, threads...
>  * How do I get the management upstairs to accept Python, or do they
> already?
>  * Hey I would switch to Python if it only had ....
>  * I never realized Python was embedded in so many places including:  Games,
> Text Editors, Database Systems, Wireless, ...
>  * Python is about as cool as Lisp for AI programming, because...
>  * I fed my dog with Python... and other projects I did with Python in my
> garage.
>  * hehe, my kids thinks I taught them how to program computer games in
> Python, when actually I taught them inductive reasoning
>  * Gees, if someone would just make the Python docs like the php ones, I
> might switch... and why this will never happen.
>  * I wish I had some way to refactor, test and understand some obsfucated
> code.
>
> What about a venue?  I posted the idea on the North Side bar, but got no
> comments.  What other venue options should we consider?
>
> Yes, there are a lot of seeds. But, really we are just looking for something
> you find interesting. Chances are if you find what your working on
> interesting and you want to share, their will be others on this list who may
> find them interesting, as well. Give it a shot.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian Ray
>
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