Playing with Trac, SVN, Apache, and LDAP

For work I have a task of creating a script utility that lets system administrators create Projects in a mix of Trac, SVN, Apache, and LDAP. Its a bunch of work, and lets me lay with pure Python yet again. Much as I like Plone/Zope, sometimes its nice to just do this sort of thing.

Anyway, Trac already comes with a command line interface. I extend it and use it quite a bit. The problem, alas, is that the Trac CLI mixes logic with presentation. So you can't extend all of it. Also, I have lots more stuff that my system is doing.

So today I'm creating views for my script. The views are the individual methods called by the user of the script, and they exist as functions within a single class. No business logic. It means at some point we can put a website around the core functionality of the script.

Anyway, I needed to write documentation for this script. I figured I would stick it in the doc strings of the individual view methods and call it with the __doc__ method. Well, I did so, and it works like a charm. So again, in Python, the code documents itself.

Again, more reason to love Python.

:)

My human rights are violated!

The coffee machine at work is broken. No caffeine. No hot water for tea even!

I'll have to either use the soda machine or run out for coffee.

Totally unfair.

import antigravity

Looks like we have a new Python statement of reality thanks to xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/353/

Capturing shell output in Python

I need to capture the terminal text returned after I run some shell commands to create SVN repos. Unfortunately, os.system() doesn't capture the text, just the numeric value. Fortunately, Python has the command library. So now I can do this:

>>> import commands
>>> print(commands.getstatusoutput('ls -l'))
(0, 'total 0\ndrwxr-xr-x    9 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  306 Nov 28 19:02 bar\ndrwxr-xr-x   11 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  374 Nov 28 19:02 baz\ndrwxr-xr-x    9 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  306 Nov 28 19:00 foo\ndrwxr-xr-x   25 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  850 Nov 27 12:33 svn_bo11282007\ndrwxr-xr-x    9 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  306 Nov 29 10:37 tsvn1\ndrwxr-xr-x    9 dgreenfe  dgreenfe  306 Nov 29 10:46 tsvn2')

How fast can I convert a Zope 3 app to Grok?

Figured it would be quick and easy to make a conversion. I'm still new with both frameworks, but since Grok is built doing DRY and KISS and various Ruby/Django-isms, this should be pretty easy.

The application in question is a Zope 3 Captcha server that I wrote. It served as my learning box for doing Zope 3 and got me past most of the Zope 3 hump.

Complexity added to Plone 3

Mikko Ohtamaa raises some good points about the problems with adding viewlets in Plone 3. It is too complex. Design patterns are good, but they can capture your focus and make you do lots more work than you need, and not just necessarily up front.

Playing with Django

I've been playing with Django over the past few days. I'm not going to compare it to Plone or Zope. But I will happily compare it to Pylons. Ready?

Django is easier than Pylons.

There. That sums it up.

Easy, intuitive, and fun.