Jeff is explaining about pdxferment, literally about making yogurt, beer, other fermentables. Dark Horse Comics is here, recruiting a Python coder, as is Patrick (a Wanderer), Jason having moved on to full time work (right Jason?). We're about twentyfive strong this evening.Brett Carter of Kavi (and a former astronomy student of Dick Pugh's at Cleveland) is talking about Python eggs, which are similar to Java jars. There was no eggified Zope 2.x MySQL adapter, which scared him. Summoning his courage, he tackled egg-making. Brett: "setuptools is just a giant monkey patch on top of disutils, adding on eggs, some other stuff." Getting your egg to include non-Python files takes some tweaking, then host your package at PiPy when you're done maybe.
Mark Frischmuth is here telling us about DemocracyLab, a think tank for building "democracy engines," a first one evolving as a Python application. He pointed us to the data model and source code threads on Clearspace. Coincidentally, I'm wearing a DemocrayLab T-shirt, but I don't say anything about my role.
Leo Soto is our visiting speaker, in the USA with Google's Summer of Code, also a Jython developer. He's here at Cubespace to share about his work around running Django on Jython.
What are the advantages? No global interpreter lock (GIL) for one thing. The Java ecosystem is rich, will read Excel files natively for example, through Apache POI support of OLE. You've got scalability with Hadoop, Hbase, JRuby... it's a lot like .NET, in terms of being packed with goodies.
In retrospect, J2EE was a big, horrible mistake (picture of Titanic). Sorry to hear that.
OK, so there's a new Web ARchive format (war). Unpacking a Django war looks something like jython manage.py war --include-java-libs = XXX.jar. War files are a kind of jar, so sort of like eggs you may have realized. There's no native MySQL or SQLServer adapter for Django on Jython, but then there's zxJDBC.
Leo showed us some back end code for talking to Postgres, importing from the original django.db.backends, but also from zxJDBC for more Java specific operations. There's only an experimental SQLite back end, per a question from the audience (not from me).
So Leo was able to get Django working on Tomcat, showed us a demo.
We can expect a finalized Jython 2.5 towards the end of the year.
I joined the more informal conversations afterward, at Green Dragon, a new brewery on 9th and Belmont, incorporating that old Q-hut that use to sell recycled computer junk. I like Jason's idea of organizing a Python 3.0 release party.
