Merry Christmas

Heading off on computer free Christmas holidays tomorrow. Back to my homeland of New Zealand and looking forward to crayfish and beef on a spit for Christmas dinner. So just wanted to post a greeting now. Thanks to all the people who have read my blog, the members of the open source community who have helped me and have provided feedback. To those who celebrate Christmas, have a great one with family and friends.

Recharged after OSDC

After attending OSDC last week, I came back energised and wanting to get some more open source stuff done.

So apart from getting Roundup to work with WSGI, I have been busy integrating a newly released version of informixdb into the Zope Informix DA and SQLObject. Informix is our development database at work and for any *ix Python DBI access we have been using mxODCBC as the previous release of informixdb had suspect threading support. The new version can be compiled with or without thread support and uses distutils to do the compile. The use of distutils alone makes it worthwhile upgrading as anyone who has tried to get the old informixdb to link has a horror story to tell. It also supports the newer data types of IDS 9 and 10.

The Zope Informix DA work is done and is currently being tested prior to release.

The experience of creating an Informix data connection for SQLObject has been interesting. I was surprised to discover that SQLObject creates insert and update SQL statements as complete strings including the data values rather than using placeholders. This created a problem for me with TEXT BLOBS as the informixdb did not translate from a string but required a buffer. The various solutions I tried can be viewed here. As none of the solutions were really perfect, I decided to request an enhancement to informixdb so it would do the string to BLOB translation automatically and the Open Source community delivered yet again. In less than 24 hours, Carsten Haese had provided a patch that did exactly what I wanted.

It had been my intention to get all these changes tested and checked in prior to going on Christmas holidays but as usual my free time as been limited with other important things like family. So looks like it will have to wait until January.

OSDC 2005 - My WSGI Talk Errata

I have updated the copy of the paper to include more info on using paste.deploy pipelines. This info was presented at the conference but wasn't part of my submitted paper due to time constraints.

OSDC 2005 - My WSGI talk

Due to lack of an Internet connection during the conference (my issue not OSDC's), I have not had a chance to post anything about the conference until now. On Monday 5 December I gave my talk on WSGI. Not really sure how it went across as no one asked any questions at the end or really talked to me about it during the rest of the conference. Of course maybe it was so good, everyone now fully understands WSGI, but that is very unlikely. Anyway the paper can be found here and the only photographic evidence of my talk can be seen here.

In the closing keynote "Tools for Freedom", Jeff Waugh made an interesting observation about how a user of our software doesn't really give a damm about the technical aspects, they just want it to make their life easier. That got me thinking about how to improve the uptake of WSGI. As much as TurboGears can use WSGI, most developers will just run the standard CherryPY server. Maybe when they start thinking about production deployment, then WSGI may be used as the "making life easier" solution. So for the next couple of months I hope to focus on making some existing python apps WSGI enabled so the users of these apps will find deployment easier. So during breaks in the conference, I wrote an adaptor to run Roundup as a WSGI app. Fixed the last of the problems on the plane to Sydney this morning and once I have fully tested it and tried it at work for one of our existing Roundup tracker sites, I will look at checking it in to the Roundup CVS.

Not sure, about the next Python app, any suggestions?