Spyced

Everything looks like a nail. Some things just work better as a traditional app, guys.

Michael Sica wrote a post about his experience writing a project manager . Java, cool I get it. JSP, there's like 3 different ways to do everything. Which do I learn. Application frameworks, started learning Struts - what a nightmare. Stared learning JSF - what a nightmare. Found Spring and Spring MVC, and they rocked. Crap, I need to learn Tiles too. Ok, so how does Tiles work with Spring MVC. Ok that's, cool. I only need to do 6 things everytime I make a form. (I actually have a list printed out so I won't forget all the steps.) Life's too short. Choose to be productive. Choose Python .

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas...

Makes me wish I had time to work on a 3D game.

I'm sure being described as "an openlazlo blogger" is probably not what he had in mind, but Michael Sica of Ataraxis Software has written more about it than I've seen anywhere else. Here's his first post on the subject , from July. Around a half dozen more follow. OpenLazlo , you will recall, is a rich web app platform that uses Jython internally . (Warning: PDF.) (Michael's blog is also interestiing from an entrepreneurial standpoint. Starting your own company is a common fantasy for developers, and Michael is doing it. I'm catching up on the archives now.)

(Today's questions are very CPython-specific, but that hasn't stopped me before. :) I spent some time today looking for the source of a bug that caused my program to leak memory. A C module ultimately proved to be at fault; before figuring that out, though, I suspected that something was hanging on to data read over a socket longer than it should. I decided to check this by summing the length of all string objects: >>> import gc >>> sum([len(o) for o in gc.get_objects() if isinstance(o, str)]) 0 No string objects? Can't be. Let's try this: >>> a = 'asdfjkl;' >>> len([o for o in gc.get_objects() if isinstance(o, str)]) 0 So: (Easy) Why don't string objects show up for get_objects()? (Harder) How can you get a list of live string objects in the interpreter?

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren...