A couple of weeks ago I bought the book “The Definitive Guide to Django,” and I’ve come to realize, to my frustration, that the book is already outdated.  My big headache this week was dealing with the administration interface, which the Django people swear is one of the coolest features of the entire application server.  [...]

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I started using this recently. If you do a lot of Python, you’ll sometimes find yourself desperate for breadcrumbs, little print statements scattered throughout your code as you try to figure what you told it to do, since it’s obviously not doing what you want it to do. I’d used inspect previously to [...]

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For the past eight days or so, I’ve been having the absolute pleasure of working on a pure research project, re-implementing FireWatir in Python. The project is known internally as “Whiskey,” (FireWatir without the R) and at some 1805 lines is faster and more concise than firewatir’s 6522 lines.
The real trick was to stop [...]

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Until circumstances change, this will just be the most horrible geek tease you can imagine.
At the office, we have exactly three approved programming languanges: C for performance, Python for everything else, and a begrudging tolerance for ECMA-262 for the WebUI team and site design. (Although the docs deployment people get away with PHP, which [...]

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I was up last night hacking on my toolchain and getting it ready for production, and I realized that part of it could be ripped out and put up as a library. I had searched for this library and found nothing, so I scratched that itch and tossed it together. I use Emacs [...]

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I recently wrote a game, and found it very much like developing a Javascript-based web application. (My wife, who’s a journalist with the video game industry beat, insists “it’s a toy, not a game. There is a difference.” I will defer.)
If you’re a web developer who does a lot of Ajax, there [...]

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I know there are people out there who love the way Ruby does some things, but there’s one feature of Ruby that drives me nuts, mostly because it doesn’t do things The One True Way of Python. And that’s call by reference.
In Python, everything is a reference. Let’s say you have some methods, and [...]

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I’ve never been happy with templating languages. Oh, sure, I use them. Wordpress (what this blog is written in) is written in PHP, and I’ve used eruby and erb for other websites. I understand what they’re trying to accomplish, but if the objective is to write an application that happens to use [...]

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Webware certainly isn’t the best and hottest and most wonderful of all application servers out there. There’s Paste, for one thing, which has a Webware emulation layer in case you ever want to move your Webware application to the latest and greatest. I’m going to use Webware because it works and because, as [...]

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For most of what I will do and show, I’m going to be using Webware For Python. I like Webware because it’s simple, and is more or less the perfect vehicle for showing various aspects of web application development. So, for this first post, I’m going to go through a usual installation of [...]

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