The May Melbourne Python User Group meeting had 25 people and three speakers.
1. Tim Richardson: An introduction to web2py
Tim walked us through the web2py web framework. Along the way we learnt that Tim is a contributor to the web2py project.
Some take home messages that I wasn’t previously aware of with web2py:
- web2py uses a DAL (Database Abstraction Layer) instead of raw SQL
- There are inbuilt validator widgets
- There is good support for AJAX views (in templates)
- Also good support for authorisation and authentication
- web2py has it’s own scheduler, running as a separate process with primitive comms via the database
- With dynamic construction of the global namespace, some IDE’s struggle. PyCharm (Pro) and PyDev work
- There are mixed opinions on web2py’s high load performance
- There is a one click installer for Ubuntu
- web2py has an inbuilt code editor and debugger
2. Tom Allen: NP-Complete game design in Python
Tom has been designing a two player game where one player lays out track and the other races it. This led to some interesting challenges in dealing with the combinatorial problems.
Some useful resources:
- Tom’s GitHub repo
- How to install Python 3.3 and PyGame on MacOS X Mavericks
- An installer for Windows users
3. Ben Finney — What’s new in Python
There are lots of interesting things happening in Python at the moment. Ben touched on:
- PEP 0466 – network security enhancements for Python 2.7
- PEP 0461 – adding % formatting to bytes and bytearray, for Python 3.5
- PEP 0465 – matrix infix multiplication operator, for Python 3.5
- Pyston – a new Python implementation on LLVM (being developed at Dropbox)
- Proctor – HTTP proxy that will distribute requests across a number of managed Tor circuits
- Lots of interesting videos from PyCon 2014 (in Montreal), including:
- Brython – Python in the browser
- Outreach program for women
- Python in two genders
- Interactive psych experiments in Pandas 3D
- Hitchhikers guide to particpating in free software
- Python packaging: a zeitgeist
Thanks to Inspire9 for hosting the meeting and for videoing the meeting: talks are available on the Inspire9 Vimeo channel.
The next meeting is June 2; 6pm at Inspire9.