Spyced

Part of the next release of Spyce will be the new scheduler module. This actually has no Spyce dependencies, so it may be useful in any (web or non-web) application that needs to run tasks at given times or intervals. Some things I have used it for: Scan the log for errors and email me a summary vacuum (pre-autovacuum daemon days...) Purge stuff from the global cache Send email to users whose accounts are about to be suspended Why a python module instead of cron? The primary benefit in my mind is that scheduler runs as a thread of your application (or app server, in Spyce's case), so you can access your database connection pool, cache, or other global state without jumping through nasty hoops. This is a bigger deal the more complex your application is... Putting logic here also makes deploying to testing or release servers (or to a client) a matter of running "svn up" rather than having to mess with crontab. You can browse the svn source here: http://svn-hosting.com

As mentioned on the mailing list, Spyce development is going on in a subversion repository. We (well, I) got tired of waiting for sourceforge to leave the CVS dark ages... Get your bleeding edge spyce from http://svn-hosting.com/svn/spyce . The web site will be updated with this information eventually soon. (Incidently, I use svn-hosting.com for several projects and it's an excellent, reasonably priced service if you feel you have better things to do than learn how to admin a new source control system. I run the svn repository for my day job and I'd rather let someone else do it when I have the choice.)

Using a tuple to pass aggregated date around is a Good Thing, but if you do it a lot or your tuple gets large then you should really use a class. Or should you? NamedTuple lets you write code like this: names = ("name", "age", "height") person1 = NamedTuple(zip(names, ["James", "26", "185"])) person2 = NamedTuple(zip(names, ["Sarah", "24", "170"])) print person1.name for i,name in enumerate(names): print name, ":", person2[i] Okay, that's pretty ugly. But reading the comments of a related recipe led me to Ganesan Rajogpal's attrdict: class attrdict(dict): def __getattr__(self, name): return self[name] def __setattr__(self, name, value): self[name] = value data = attrdict(red=1, green=2, blue=3) print data.red data.black = 4 Much cleaner to use, as well as less code to implement. (Although not immutable, so you couldn't use an attrdict a

Making progress towards WebObjects/Tapestry/ASP.NET/JSF-style reusable components. As a first step, I've checked in code to svn trunk allowing the defining of handlers to run on form submissions. Working example: [[\ def __init__(self): self.i = int(request.getpost1('i', 0)) def plusone(self): self.i += 1 def plustwo(self): self.i += 2 ]] <f:form> [[= self.i ]] <f:hidden name="i" value="=self.i"> <f:submit handler="self.plusone" value="Add one"> <f:submit handler="self.plustwo" value="Add two"> </f:form>

Here is a stripped down script that tests a part of Spyce's code to "export" variables from an active tag to the main spyceProcess scope. Even without knowing the background, though, you should be able to figure out: What error will running this code produce? class spyceImpl: def spyceProcess(self): ___tagexports={'y': 1, 'item': 0} for ___tagkey in ___tagexports: exec("%s = ___tagexports['%s']"%(___tagkey,___tagkey)) test = spyceImpl() test.spyceProcess()