• 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.

Results from Surveys discussions -

• More timely  notifications for the meetings.  A 2week/1week pattern and a 1week pattern were discussed.
• Coding by example is one of the most requested topics.  However, we need steady access to a projector to make that work.
• Vary content over the meeting from Beginner to Advanced
• Win lottery and split proceeds with others interested in Python, then they can retire and have time to attend.
• Noticed lots of Python envy from perl coders.  (Can’t we all just get along?)
• Lansky’s has as many benefits as negatives.  We are game for any venue with more pluses — Looking for ideas and offers.
• Usage (most to least): WEB, SysAdmin, DataBase, Desktop, Other, Games, CompSci, Hobby, Academic, Mobile, Robotics, Scientific
  • Other includes: rapid security tool dev
• how many times have you attended: 46% – Never, 30% 1-10, 15% 24, 8% – >24

• Review Steve’s Survey for the group.
• Here is our survey, created at the meeting.  We will be emailing it to the group.  Please participate by taking the survey, your thoughts and comments are important.
• We plugged the lunch meet-up with the focus on working together building interesting python apps championed by Steve

More details to follow.

Other Notes:  We updated wordpress so if you notice any glitches please let us know.

Meeting notes to be added.

We discussed the possibility of starting a lunch meet-up to sharpen our skills by building a fun project.  From the topics of the night Jeff suggested creating Conway’s Game of Life and have it tweet updates.  Please chime in on the email list if you are interested or have suggestions.

A few of the projects discussed were:

• how to create a lot of tweets and schedule them to be sent at certain times or intervals.
• how to sync Facebook and Twitter updates
• cURL - command line tool to transfer data with url syntax

I failed to take notes so please add to the comments for what I forgot!

• django-command-extensions – “This is a repository for collecting global custom management extensions for the Django Framework.”  Of particular interest was the graph_models model which creates a GraphVis dot file (or an image) of your models.  You can specify the whole project or specific apps.  The code is here.
• “Databrowse is a Django application that lets you browse your data.  Databrowse dynamically creates a rich, browsable Web site by introspecting your models.”  This comes free with Django, and is similar to the admin interface, with the ability to click links to related tables to follow how the data is connected.
• We were discussing how to easily get test data into the Django models when building a project and needing to build, test, tear down, build, test… and came up with two items:
  • When your model is not changing much, Django comes with Fixtures.  “Fixtures are a way of loading data into the database in bulk. Fixture data can be stored in any serializable format (including JSON and XML).”
  • When you are just beginning and have a sample set of data, and need to build a model, test it, throw it away, create another model, and loading the data each time, Jeff suggested using the “writing custom django-admin commands” feature to write your own Django manage.py code.  Then you only have to tweak this to fit the new model and run to import.  This gives a place to put code when it doesn’t belong in the finished app.
• Mercurial was suggested as a nice start to version control, especially for Windows users.  Jeff explained how committing small updates and documenting them helps in several ways:
  • when a bug is noticed after several changes it is easy to unload each change and test to see where the problem is.
  • you can try something “crazy” without much worry because it will be easy to revert to the previous version.
  • easier to build and test changes before submitting them to a live project.

Panera’s had good food and outlets near tables, but this particular location is pretty loud, not a good choice for the future in my opinion…