[python-uk] Tell us what you did with Python this year....

[Jonathan Hartley]

OK, I'll bite, because what we're doing is exciting and new to me, so 
maybe to others also:

Here at Resolver a couple of years ago we wrote a spreadsheet-like 
desktop application entirely in Python. Cell formulae are also full 
Python expressions, with a slightly augmented grammar to allow the use 
of common spreadsheet-isms, such as 'A1:C4' to refer to a cell range. 
This was specifically written in IronPython, with a Windows Forms GUI, 
because a number of our financial industry clients wanted .Net 
interoperability. We had a little trepidation about using IronPython, 
but in practice it turned out to work really well for us - the 
IronPython team did a really good job. Conversion between .Net and 
Python types is unobtrusively and automatically done, so that, for 
example, you don't have to worry about creating a .Net mapping type to 
pass to a static-typed C# API - you can simply pass it a regular Python 
dict, and everything magically 'just works' beautifully. In theory, we 
should have been able to run cross-platform using Mono, but to get 
started quickly, we used a third-party GUI component which made win32 
calls. This made it impossible to run on other platforms, and with 
hindsight we should have fixed this already, by replacing that GUI 
component, but that's still to be done.

This year we converted that desktop application into a web application 
called Dirigible. Think 'Google Docs' spreadsheet, but again with full 
Python expressions in cells, plus the ability for users to inject their 
own code into the recalculation process, for example to define 
functions, import third-party modules, iterate over cells, etc. This is 
running in CPython, as a Django app, on Amazon EC2 instances. We have 
already made it possible for clients with extremely large spreadsheets 
(which take hours to recalculate on Excel) to manually partition 
calculations to run in parallel across several EC2 instances. Soon we 
hope to make this process automatic, by examining the dependency graph 
(which cells depend on which other cells) and passing large stand-alone 
chunks of the graph to be recalculated on other machines.

A lot of our core code, such as formula parsing and dependency 
calculation, didn't use any .Net at all, and so getting Dirigible 
running under CPython using code from Resolver One was straightforward. 
Nevertheless, personally I'd never done any Django nor Javascript, nor 
EC2 before, and the other guys on the team weren't massively experienced 
in these things either, so there was a concern about how quickly we 
could make progress. Happily, we managed to go from first conception 
('mkdir Dirigible') to first beta release of Dirigible in two and a half 
months, and have been releasing updates every couple of days since, 
which is something I'm very proud of.

Going forward, we hope that the two products will compliment each other 
(web apps aren't the right solution for everyone), and that code-sharing 
between the projects will mean that improvements in one (e.g. in 
providing robust statistical functions, or more Excel-compatible 
functions) will also improve the other.

Interested to hear anyone else's stories.

     Jonathan Hartley
     Resolver Systems


On 20/12/2010 12:18, Andy Robinson wrote:
> As an attempt to generate some content and balance out the "jobs" discussion....
>
> Why don't a few people here tell us what they got up to this year?
> Neat projects at work, things you learned about Python in 2010, things
> you've been playing with....
>
> I'm having a mad day but will try to post mine tonight or tomorrow...
>
> - Andy
> _______________________________________________
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> python-uk at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk

-- 
Jonathan Hartley      Made of meat.      http://tartley.com
tartley at tartley.com   +44 7737 062 225   twitter/skype: tartley