In Re:

After listening to the wonderful things being said about SQLAlchemy at PyCon, I wondered if the following idiom could be implemented as a Domain Object with SQLAlchemy.

Often we have legacy data that we have read only access, to which we need to associate additional meta information. Before this has always meant that the application had to be aware of the relationship of the meta data record in the ExoTagging DB and how to map it to the legacy read-only data. If we could map the two into a single Domain Object it would make are apps a lot cleaner. I spoke to Mark Ramm and he believed that it would be possible and in fact it might even be easy although he hadn’t attempted it before.

I call the idiom ExoTagging because it is logically quite like the idea of Tags, except that tags are kept in a table that resides in a database that is separate from the data that is being tagged. Hence Exo-Tag.

Has anyone else already implemented something like this with SQLAlchemy, if so would you mind sharing your experiences?

2 Questions that I wished that were asked of the Panel:

1) Why PyChecker given PyLint? Could you contrast the two tools?

2) For those utilities that test user facing web applications, twill, mechanize, etc, Why are they better than Selenium?

I believe that it is time to resurrect the Omaha Python Users Group. I attended that Python Advocacy meeting on Day 1 of PyCon and listened to Jeff Rush and then talked to the leader of ChiPy, Chris McAvoy. There is an advocacy open session tonight @9pm after the OLPC show and tell session. I am hoping to work with others there to set up a system to share web resources, mailing list, website, etc between users groups. People should be able to go to the python site and “Find a local users Group”. The users groups could video tape speakers, and then share those videos for use at other user group meetings and for advocacy in general. A central point for available speakers and a centralized place for companies like O’Reilly, to offer products, books, and other give-aways that could be requested and used by the different users groups.

Of late there has been much to do about the crop of Python based web frameworks. Is one superior to another? Currently, I don’t believe so they all have strengths and weaknesses and I could make a good argument for most of them. However, in the midst of this current genesis there are some shining stars that I think are setting the way forward. These stars are not the frameworks themselves but components that are written to be framework agnostic. For example, Paste, WSGI, SQLAlchemy and ToscaWidgets. By supplying these fundamental and highly useful tools, they are empowering the current and future web frameworks.

I think that all of the frameworks should look for commonality that can be shared, that can be improved for the benefit of all. Even if you want to have a full single source stack as opposed to a best of breed stack plugin architectures should be the standard. So advancements can spread between the frameworks.

What about the frameworks? I believe that in the end their will be two major web frameworks, Django and TurboGears/Pylons. Twisted won’t go away and neither will Nevow but they won’t match the popularity of the two majors. However, I firmly believe that all of the frameworks will have similar traits and in time will tend to a center balance point using different toolkits as the “preferred”.