the Forty-Second Parallel

In my ongoing quest for nirvana in the land of Python web programming, I happened upon this blog entry, which basically echoes my past sentiments on the subject - too many half-complete, may-not-be-around-in-a-year frameworks.

There's obviously a need that isn't being met. But instead of working with existing, more mature frameworks (Zope, Webware, Twisted, etc.) to make them better, people end up scratching the itch in their own way - leading to too many half-complete, may-not-be-around-in-a-year frameworks. Nothing against people scratching the itch in their own way. But we now have a bunch of half-scratched itches, which makes it itch even more.

And the problem really isn't the number of options. It's that there's no obvious choice. There isn't any one framework (or two) that makes the most sense to use or at least that provides a good starting point - like Tomcat/JSP/Servlets. In the end, it's like the linked post sums it all up - "At least with PHP, you don't have to choose."

Agreed.

I meant to mention this last week, but (my excuse for everything lately) I didn't have a chance.

Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in Java) recently did a presentation for the California Digital Library on issues and directions for Java wherein he discusses the current state and future of Java, new features in Java 1.5, and comparisons to other languages. Python gets a lot of attention, to the apparent anoyance of at least one attendee. During the Q/A session, this attendee asked "If you like Python so much, why don't you write 'Thinking in Python'?", to which he replied, "I intend to."

Full video of entire talk available - warning, over 2 hours long.

Interesting feedback available here and here.

Well, here goes the obligatory "been too busy to blog entry" ...

My quiet post-vacation summer turned into full blown chaos after July 1. We got moved into our new house just over a week ago. We're still not finished painting, etc. Lots left to do; but there's plenty of time for that. We'll do what we can when we can.

I did find time to go all wireless - for various reasons, I had to put the cable modem in a different room than the desktop. So, I decided that would be a good excuse for cutting the last network cord. So far so good. Thought about using another access point and setting up a bridge to the wireless router at the cable modem. That turned out to be more trouble than it's worth at this point. So, ended up just plopping an 802.11g wireless card into the desktop and moving on. I like it when things work.

Well, that didn't take very long. Someone has thrown together a python module for accessing your Gmail account. Haven't seen any other information other than what was posted to the Python list. It's pretty basic - asks for login info, returns a list of folders, prints the content of all messages in a selected folder. Mostly proof of concept at this point - it's essentially a web client that takes the place of the browser. Still, pretty nifty. It's a testament to the ease of use and power of Python that something like this can be done in ~250 lines of code.

Update: Link to actual project page - libgmail.