PyCon Envy

I am jealous! I want to be at PyCon 2007 and reading the few blog posts (I think everyone there is having too good a time to blog) makes me want to be there even more. Hopefully the video and audio will be uploaded soon. Guess I will just have to save, convince the "better half" it's for the good of the family and make it to PyCon 2008. Alec Thomas will be giving a debrief on his time at PyCon 2007 for the April SyPy meeting so more envy likely.

IronPython 1.1 Beta 1 Released

Just in time for PyCon 2007, Dino Viehland of the IronPython Dev Team announced the release of the first IronPython 1.1 Beta.

<snip>
This release primarily focuses on adding the remaining new functionality for the 1.1 release (array module, importing pre-compiled modules) along with many new bug fixes. Also included but previously available with 1.1 Alpha 1 are the new XML Doc comment integration with the help system, the SHA, MD5, and select modules. The remaining of the 1.1 cycle will focus on bug fixes.
</snip>

OSDC 2007 will be in Brisbane

Arjen Lentz announced today that Brisbane will be the host city for this years OSDC. Time to start thinking about possible paper topics again.

Update

Thanks for reminding me Keith. Once the actual conference venue is announced, we will also need to find a venue for the nightly Beer BOF's.

FePy now shipped with Mono 1.2.3

From the Mono 1.2.3 release notes:

"In this release, we are now shipping the IronPython Community Edition (IPCE) from Seo Sanghyeon. IPCE includes a number of preconfigured libraries with IronPython to improve your IronPython developing experience."

This is release 5 of IPCE but Sanghyeon continues to improve it and the latest can be checked out from IPCE repository.

Blog of Note?

Today this blog is Bloggers "Blog of Note". Well that explains the abnormal traffic statistics.

mod_wsgi Performance

Graham Dumpleton has published his benchmarks for mod_wsgi.

mod_wsgi - simple and fast apache wsgi serving

There are a many ways to serve a WSGI application via Apache with FastCGI appearing to be the favorite. If you have to support many diverse operating systems running different versions of Apache, serving a WSGI application via CGI is a guaranteed but not fast deployment method. You may be wondering why I haven't suggested the WSGI mod_python adaptor as a solution. I am sure it is a workable alternative but it requires mod_python and I have had lots of issues getting it to compile for some platforms and to work with a specific Python interpreter. Now there is a new solution.

Graham Dumpleton has been working on an Apache module called mod_wsgi. Quoting from his website:

"The mod_wsgi adapter is an Apache module that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python based web applications within Apache. The adapter is written completely in C code against the Apache C runtime and for hosting WSGI applications within Apache provides significantly better performance than using existing Python based WSGI adapters for mod_python. The module can be compiled for and used with either Apache 1.3, 2.0 or 2.2."

I have been lucky enough to get early access to the code and try it with my WSGI applications. I able to compile, configure and have mod_wsgi running a simple WSGI application under Apache 2.0.55 and Python 2.4.3 in under 5 minutes, Certainly a much better experience than I have had with mod_python. Since I have been testing it on my "gutless" laptop rather listing the results of my benchmarking, I will leave Graham to publish his more comprehensive benchmarking results. But I will make some observations. It appears to run simple WSGI applications at least twice as fast as mod_python and 15-20 times faster than using CGI. I was also able to run a number of my WSGI applications that use either Pylons or combinations of WSGI middleware with no problems. At yesterdays SyPy meeting, Graham showed it running Django. The official release will hopefully be in March.

SyPy Social Meetup

Last night was the second meeting of the Sydney Python Users Group for 2007 and we had a good turnout.

There was a wide range of topics discussed including:

• Unit Testing
• Software Deployment
• Distributed Version Control
• Apache and WSGI - more about this in another post
  

So if you are in the Sydney and are interested these types of topics, why not join us the first Thursday of each month. Details of the next meeting can be found at:

http://groups.google.com/group/sydneypython/web/sypy-home

Hope to see you in March.