• Version Controls – subversion and mercurial with Google code, and some basics on VC’s for newbies.
• Django – Steve introduced a flashcard app, Jeff shared a bit on the ‘render’ shortcut, and he has backported it to v1.2 if you are interested.  Proper app templating namespace was discussed.
• PyCharm 2.5 is out with better templating, virtual env, and version control tools.
• ToDoPy – our learning project at google code, was discussed showing what we had done last month, and what to work on this month – adding a Tasks class by sub-classing List, and the associated tests to accompany it.

We had a projector and the screen sharing was much better than last month – thanks Jeff.

Hope to see everyone next month.

•  Defining the problem
•  Initial architecture of the solution
•  Building a corner-stone class
•  Writing our first tests (not necessarily in that order <g>)

To get ready for the fun, bring a laptop or device with:

•  python 2.x installed
•  virtualenv 
•  py.test (demo here)
•  a favorite editor
•  a smile

We don’t have an advanced level talk set in stone yet, so if you are yearning to talk about a project you are working on, something in the standard or 3rd party libs that saved your bacon or just made you say “Cool.” We’d love to have you tell us about it. No experience required.

Door Prize: O’Reilly Python Book.

Wednesday, March 21st at 7pm.  See the where and when page for directions.

In the future Jeff plans on doing a session on supporting Python 2 and 3 just like CherryPy does.   And since he plans on using Tox which was written by Holger Krekel (the same guy who develops py.test) we figured now would be a good time for us to tryout py.test.

Details on the March meeting coming soon.

• Django
• Django and RESTful interfaces via Piston and XML-RPC
• Message Queuing – specifically RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ and STOMP and the 5 primary usage patterns.  And integrating MQs in Django with Celery.
• We also had a “follow me” presentation on getting started with Selenium2‘s webdriver.  The following are my notes on the presentation:

-- Selenium2 --

Selenium RC vs Webdriver -
Selenium - http://seleniumhq.org/
         - http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html
Why - http://seleniumhq.org/docs/appendix_migrating_from_rc_to_webdriver.html

Firefox, Chrome, Ie, iOS, Android, Opera

-- Setting up an environment --
  virtualenv --no-site-packages Se-Pres(entation)
  cd Se-Pres
  source bin/activate
  easy_install selenium
Now fire up an interpreter:
  python
  from selenium import webdriver
  b = webdriver.Firefox()
  b.get('http://www.google.com/')
  b.page_source
  dir(b)
  b.name
  b.get_cookies()   (a list of dicts, each containing a cookie and support info)
  b.current_url

>>> b.find_element_by_name('q')
<selenium.webdriver.remote.webelement.WebElement object at 0x874b22c>
>>> sbx = b.find_element_by_name('q')
>>> sbx.send_keys('omaha python')
>>> sbx.submit()
>>> b.title
u'omaha python - Google Search'

  b.find_element_by_name('foo')
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException

-- Other Helpful things --
unittest - http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html#
nose - http://readthedocs.org/docs/nose/en/latest/

nose-testconfig - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nose-testconfig/

The meeting concluded about 9pm when the venue closed but we continued with a 15 minute parking lot track that included references to Code Complete and general development concepts.  Great Meeting! and everyone is looking forward to the next.

Joe talked about the 2 semester course he attended at Iowa Western on Linux Engineering.

Steve talked about Code Like a Pythonista, by David Goodger.  He thinks it is a great resource.  I agree with him. (So much I did a presentation on David’s material back in 2008).  Steve also liked the Python Challenge.  He has made it though the first 5 or 6 so far and hopes to make it all the way through.

Joe brought up the fact that Full Circle Magazine – has released two specific Python issues, Issue 1 and Issue 2.

Jeff brought a Code editor that he likes, Editra.  It is a very nice, rapidly advancing development environment.  If you are in the market you should take a look if Komodo or PyCharm are turning your head.

A non-python, learn how to program environment is MIT’s Scratch.  Joe likes Snake Wrangling for Kids.

Steve talked about the book he just read, “Start Small, Stay Small“.  The premise is fast is good.   Jeff talked about the book he was reading, “Programming Collective Intelligence”.  Conversations then turned to SQL, and good resources.   It was pointed out there are a number of really good references on the web and that it is probably best to just do it, keeping in mind that every table needs a primary key and to never depend on the user to give you information that you would use as part of the primary key without checking.

Jeff was motivated by the PyCon video, “Python and Robots: Teaching programming in High School“.  He actually went out and got an S2 and Fluke board and is now actively teaching his kids how to program robots in Python.

More talk about the results from the survey were discussed.  Focusing on “events” and moving away from traditional “user group” seemed to be popular and something we want to move forward and try.

Next “Event” is in May — See you then.