The App Engine 1.7.7 pre-release SDKs were released about a week ago and I finally got around to taking a look at the source code. The only real addition in the release notes and what caught my eye was the socket API being released as an experimental feature for billed apps. Being an experimental feature, that means that the feature is included in the SDK and you can try it out at least locally.

I recently came across one feature of Django that seemed pretty useful for one off projects and customizations and was startled because it's one of Django's least mentioned features.

Python supports a simple type of multiple inheritance which allows the creation of Mixins. Mixins are a sort of class that is used to "mix in" extra properties and methods into a class. This allows you to create classes in a compositional style. Mixins are a really great concept but I often find that people use them incorrectly which can lead to some bugs. I often see Mixins used like the fo[...]

There is a small but growing Python community in Japan. Many people, even some of those Python enthusiasts who living in Japan, are unaware of this and don't know who any of these people are. There are a lot of reasons for this but the number one reason is probably the large language barrier between Japanese speakers and non-Japanese speakers. Currently it can be kind of hard to know who's in[...]

Recently there have been a lot of conversations on the Django mailing list about fixing the auth module. Here are some of the recent mailing list threads: 1. authentication by email 2. auth.User refactor: reboot 3. auth.User: The abstract base class idea Originally the topic came up because of the fact that you can't really authenticate effectively using the email address as a usernam[...]

I had an application with two lists of unique items that I wanted to take the intersection of. I had figured that using a python set would be faster but I didn't realize that it would be faster than the simple list comprehension by this much. ~$ python -m timeit -n 1000 "range1500=range(500, 1500);[x for x in range(1000) if x in range1500]" 1000 loops, best of 3: 18.2 msec per [...]

On Saturday we held our first Python JP 2011. We had approximately 230 people show up which I think is great for a first time Python conference in Japan. I want to thank all of the members of the planning committee, staff, and attendees for such a wonderful event. I had so much fun! The Python community in Japan is growing but has not been very organized so it has been hard to see how many p[...]

The Python Programming Language community in Japan will be having our first Pycon JP on August 27th at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (産業技術大学院大学) in Tokyo's Shinagawa Seaside. Pycon JP started in the aftermath of Pycon APAC 2010 in Singapore. Pycon APAC 2011 was set to be in Singapore again but the location of the conference in 2012 had not been set yet. Yasushi Masuda , Man[...]

The Kay team just just released Kay 1.1! I want to thank Takashi Matsuo, Nickolas Daskalou, Tasuku Suenaga, and Yosuke Suzuki for their hard work on this release. Kay is a web framework made specifically for Google App Engine. The basic design of Kay is based on the Django framework, such as middleware, settings, pluggable applications, etc. Kay uses Werkzeug as lower level framework, Jinja2[...]

(This post is the English translation of the Dec. 24th edition of the Python Web Framework Advent Calendar 2010. Other posts can be found at: http://atnd.org/events/10465 though they will be in Japanese) I usually use the kay framework for Appengine development as I am a developer for the framework, but recently I have been playing with the Tipfy framework (http://www.tipfy.org) written by R[...]