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From BBSWiki

• Development scratchpad on other wiki
• http://www.rfc-editor.org/

Python

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_programming_language
• O'Reilly: Python Cookbook
• O'Reilly: Learning Python
• PyDev documentation - Eclipse Python integration

Twisted

• Twisted - Python event-driven network services framework
  • Core Documentation
  • O'Reilly: Twisted Network Programming Essentials
  • Twisted is primarily event driven but has some thread support.
  • Deferred reference

Multi-client communication

• http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/core/documentation/examples/chatserver.py
• Twisted Application Framework HOWTO / twistd
• Proxy example

UI

• invective CVS decode how he does it, especially here - from twisted.conch.stdio import runWithProtocol
• user input (old, but a clue)... twisted.internet.stdio and twisted.conch.insults.
  • stdin.py
  • stdiodemo.py
  • twisted.conch.insults.text - color!
    • Twisted Conch examples
    • twisted.conch.insults.insults.TerminalProtocol
    • http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/conch/documentation/examples/demo_insults.tac
    • twisted.conch.stdio undocumented
• mentions curses

Database

• Use of an RDBMS must be done through Twisted like this to prevent blocking.
  • failing inserts

Misc

• Python 2.5 is going to have an interesting feature (look up PEP 342) that'll make Twisted (and other code like it) more readable
• SingletonMixin - broken for 2.5?
• twisted.python.failure.Failure API
• http://www.pragma2000.com/wiki/index.php?GThreadless - This may be of some help. It's a stackless python hack that adds continuations, making twisted code look like blocking code.

Unicode

• http://docs.python.org/lib/standard-encodings.html codecs module for converting unicode to other character sets (unicode is supported natively: s = u"I am a unicode string.")
• http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode
• http://www.diveintopython.org/xml_processing/unicode.html

XML

• lxml - Python wrapper for the C libxml2 and libxslt libraries. 1.x version depending on libxml2 2.x -- looks stable.
  • XML Schema validation
  • XML document parsing using an API very similar to ElementTree
  • The API extends ElementTree API to expose libxml2 and libxslt specific functionality, such as XPath, Relax NG, XML Schema, XSLT, and c14n. Python code can be called from XPath expressions and XSLT stylesheets through the use of extension functions. lxml also offers a SAX compliant API, that works with the SAX support in the standard library.
• SimpleXMLWriter module for ElementTree
  • StringIO / cStringIO
  • py2exe breakage and solutions
• XML anti-bozo page

Compression

• gzip (using StringIO and included gzip)

Unit testing

• http://pyunit.sourceforge.net/

PostgreSQL

• PL/pgSQL stored procedure language
• PL/Python. nuff said. Check the preload option for efficiency.
• full-text indexing possible.. but how?

Programming paradigms

Event-driven programming

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming - see links here
• http://eventdrivenpgm.sourceforge.net/ - Good Event-driven overview, tutorial doc

• One idea is to program a hybrid server in the following way: One thread does all network I/O (using event systems), and the other threads execute the operations the server provides. For example, consider a server doing remote procedures (as most servers do). Such a server receives requests, and every request is responded. When the server starts up, the networking thread begins to wait for requests. When a complete request has been received, a new thread is started performing the requested operation. The network thread continues immediately, normally doing other network I/O. When the operation is over, an artificial event is generated indicating this situation (see below on artificial events). The artificial event carries the result of the operation, and is added to the event system directly from the thread that executed the operation. This thread can now stop working. The network thread receives this artificial event like every other event, and can start sending the result over the network back to the client.

  http://ocaml-programming.de/packages/documentation/equeue/users-guide/c494.html

Design patterns

• Read up on MVC (see CS 320 notes)
• Observer, aka publish/subscribe

Wire protocol

Transmission

Packaging

• SOAP complex and requires polling
• JSON-RPC very preliminary Twisted support and async
• XML-RPC what SOAP came from; simple. requires polling. wide support.
• XMPP bidirectional XML stream protocol used by Jabber, with Twisted support ..ish?
  • [1] (thread)
  • [2] (explanation of protocol)
  • [3] (some XMPP Twisted chat code)
  • [4] (Twisted jabber package)
• NetStrings extremely simple, 8-bit clean, supported by Twisted

General XML stuff, software, etc

• W3Schools XML Schema tutorial
  • ...and reference
  • ...and validator
• XMLSpy

Web Front End

• JQuery (shh...)

License

• BSD license
• CPL (common public license)
• comparison chart

Forum Threads, Polls, etc.

• read this thread, Java vs. Python, PEP 342 etc.

Django

• http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jul/23/replacing-django-s-orm-with-sqlalchemy/
• http://gitorious.org/projects/django-sqlalchemy
• http://codespatter.com/2008/10/15/setting-up-apache2-mod_python-mysql-and-django-on-debian-lenny-or-ubuntu-hardy-heron/
• http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2009/05/notes-using-pip-and-virtualenv-django/