Announcing Garbaginator!

While working on Packaginator at the PyCon 2011 sprints we discovered some serious issues in the way that Django handles garbage collection. After a huge amount of work, we managed to isolate and fix the problem. This 'fix', as it were, was only possible by doing a very sophisticated 'hack' of critical internal components of the Django Web Application framework. We also discovered that similar issues occurred in other existing Python application frameworks such as Pyramid, Flask, Web.py, Web2Py, Grok, Twisted, Tornado, Google App Engine, and Rails.

Since then the Packaginator community has been fiercely debating what we should do with our newly created set of hacks. After a lot of arguments going both ways we've decided to come up with our own application framework and release it to the world under the GPL license.

This brand new application framework ignores the lessons learned from all the other Python frameworks and embraces the cutting edge concept of Not-Invented-Here. It focuses less on features and enhancements over existing systems and much, much more on the critical concept of formal Garbage handling.

Some of the critical modules include:

• RubberGloves (for handling dirty objects)
• Django-Garbaginator
• Flask-Recycling
• Pyramid-Garbaginator
• Web.2.py Garbaginator Bridgerator ('cause people always get Web2Py and web.py confused with each other so we bridged them together)
• BlueBream

Check out the home page at: http://garbaginator.cartwheelweb.com

Fork Garbaginator on GitHub: https://github.com/cartwheelweb/garbaginator

Note: This was an April Fool's Day Joke

I'll get you next time, Wesley Chun!

At the start of this month I laid out the Great Pycon Ribbon Game. PyCon ribbons are given to people based on their contribution to the conference. Give a tutorial, present a speech, volunteer to do grunt work, sponsor the event, be Guido van Rossum, and more each gives you a special colored ribbon you get to attach to your conference badge.

Last year I had the most of anyone except for Wesley Chun. He's one of my favorite instructors, is an author and Google App Engine advocate, and a good friend. To my five ribbons he had seven. He clearly beat me and deserved the win.

This year when I issued my ribbon challenge he immediately said that he was giving up. He had too much work and family things going on. I gave him my regrets and planned to totally crush everyone's ribbon count at the conference. I was sure I could duplicate my five ribbon effort from last year and no one else would be able to match me!

So imagine my surprise when Wesley Chun had seven, SEVEN ribbons on his badge. He beat me this year. Worse, I managed only four this year. So he didn't just beat me at the game, he opened the lead.

I'm a good loser. I don't begrudge him. Well, maybe not too much.

Next year I'll issue the challenge again. I hope you join us, since win or lose the wonderful thing about this competition is that PyCon and the community benefits.

I've not quite done LAMP, or have I?

It hit me just now that while I've played with all the individual bits of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python), I've never actually done LAMP per se. I tend to play with Plone/Zope professionally, and in my goof off time I prefer to delve into wxPython, with my Django work being all too rare. I'm wondering if it might be worth it to do some formal LAMP work, and there might be available work at NASA for it real soon.

On the other hand, according to the Wikipedia entry on LAMP the 'M' in LAMP can mean 'middle-ware'. In which case I am professionally doing LAMP every work day.

Feedparser does not work with Google App Engine

After my laughable mistake of trying to do a import feedparser.py, I sat down yesterday and spent half an hour writing my rss aggregator for Google App Enginer. Critical, of course, was use of the excellent feedparser project. It was easy to get everything working, and while not styled it looked good. Everything except for using Feedparser to parse the incoming rss and atom feeds.

Alas, Feedparser tries to use a few modules that the enterprising folks at Google restricted. I haven't done any research yet, but I wonder if it is in the arena of fetching data from URLs, since app engine has its own library. I'll poke at it tomorrow.

In any case, I was very pleased with Google App Engine. Lets go over why:

• Database is not a RDBMS. Some people might scream at this issue, but the benefits we get are wonderful. Expando seems really fun to use.
• Built-in ORM. Sure, its not SQLAlchemy or the Django system, but its not that far different in approach and implementation.
• Django Templates! If I'm not doing TAL and I'm doing XHTML/XML, then my choice is Django. Templates.
• Cleanly documented. Clear and simple sentences with good examples that are working code, not doc or CLI tests.
• Easy and intuitive. This part is critical. The framework is not in the way.

Update: Apparently Feedparser works with GAPE. Either something changed about GAPE (feedparser hasn't been updated in a while) or maybe I had a bug. Thanks to Alex UK and crchemist for pointing this out.

What I want in a feed aggregator

The list is simple:

1. One page that displays all the content. Maybe do some pagination, or hide descriptions and just show titles. Otherwise have tags, author, description, and link to original post.
   
2. One page with a text area that accepts one feed per line.
3. Include some sort of authentication.

Ways to get this done
Google App Engine handles #3 for me nicely and gives me free hosting. But feedparser doesn't play well with it and I'm not about to do that kind of debugging. Maybe I ought to try BeautifulSoup?

I'm tempted to try a pure Django system, since that could handle all three, but then I would have to pay for hosting. The same would go for Grok as well. I don't want to pay for hosting yet. Or maybe I ought to just pony up a few bucks a month anyhow...

Of course, I can always write my own simple wxPython client.

What to do... what to do...

Update: Never code on two hours sleep. I'm going with Google app Engine because I realized that when you import of feedparser you can't do this:

import feedparser.py