django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines

Django is one of the premier web frameworks for Python, and is often compared to Ruby-on-Rails. Jacob is one of the lead developers on Django.

Compiling Dynamic Languages

Dynamic languages like Python have gained significant popularity in mainstream programming. To support their dynamic features, they are often interpreted. In scientific computing applications, this works well for prototyping, but often means that significant efforts must later be invested in building the "real" application. Our thesis is that dynamic languages like Python can be effectively compiled by translation to statically typed functional languages like OCaml. Not only that, but this approach is highly amenable to formal verification. This, in fact, entails developing a formal semantics for the dynamic language. The talk described ongoing efforts to demonstrate this strategy in the concrete case of compiling Python using OCaml. After explaining why statically typed functional languages like OCaml may play an important role in compiling dynamic languages, we describe our progress to date in understanding the semantics of Python and in devising a correct translation into OCaml. At the time of writing this abstract, preliminary performance measurement were quite encouraging.

Raj Bandyopadhyay is Walid Taha's student. Walid Taha is an assistant professor at Rice University, Houston, TX. He is the principal investigator on a number of NSF, Texas ATP, and SRC research grants and contracts on various aspects of resource aware proWalid Taha gramming. Taha is actively involved in development of both the embedded software and generative programming research communities.

ReUsable Web Components with Python and Future Python Web Development

ABSTRACT Python's Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) not only enables a multitude of Python web frameworks to share code when it comes to deployment, but also enables entirely new levels of re-use for Python web development. This talk is focused on explaining WSGI, new types of re-use with WSGI middleware, and explore new frameworks that heavily utilize WSGI; in this case, Pylons. Moving beyond monolithic frameworks that try to do everything themselves, to new modes of development where you can use just the parts you want and still have active development communities to interact with.

Creating a Flex application using the TurboGears framework

In this screen capture video tutorial, Bruce Eckel and James Ward pair up to create an Adobe Flex application using the TurboGears framework (see Figure 1). Follow along as these experts show you how to put it all together.