Eweek says that Ruby on Rails is poised to overtake Java as the language of choice for the web:

However, the non-Java Ruby on Rails, which is based on the Ruby dynamic language, has posed perhaps the biggest threat to Java development on the Web tier.

And perhaps the biggest Java “pressure-izer” is David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, who shared his thoughts on the new development landscape with eWEEK.

David does note in the article that while lots of people are using RoR in some way, it would appear that very few are using it in true production environments. But I would guess that if lots of new/younger programmers are playing with RoR in their spare time, eventually it will start showing up in a big way in IT departments as those people get hired and move up.

Quoth Fuzzyman:

So Guido has conceded, class decorators will make it into some future version of Python; but probably not the imminent 2.5. It’s nice to see that Guido is flexible in introducing features in Python that support the alternative implementations.

And Python creeps another step closer to Perl.

Via: Lambda the Ultimate

I finally got around to uploading the slides from the presentations I’ve done at CPLUG meetings. So far you can check out the following topics:

• Building an IPCop Firewall - May 10, 2005
• A Beginner’s Guide to MediaWiki - November 8, 2005
• An Overview of Synergy - November 10, 2004

Enjoy.

Tomorrow is the 7th Python Bug Day, scheduled for right before the Python 2.5 alpha 1 release.

Quoth the announcement:

The aim of the bug day is to close as many bugs, patches and feature requests as possible, this time with a focus on small feature additions that can still go into the upcoming 2.5 alpha release.

It will officially run from 9AM to 4PM on Friday, March 31, 2006.

Update: Jeremy Hylton comments:

“The Python 2.5a1 release is imminent, too. Anthony Baxter had originally planned a code freeze for Thursday … but pushed in back a week because of the bug day. The exact schedule hasn’t been worked out, but I’d expect the alpha in the second week of April. The final release is currently schedule for late summer, but I’d expect that to slip into early fall.”

The Scripps media/newspaper company will be moving 15 of their sites to Django. Specifically, they will be using the Ellington CMS.

Quoth Adrian:

Getting Django (and Python) onto so many more Real-World production sites is a huge win for the framework and the Python programming language. That list of Django-powered sites keeps growing and growing.

Congrats to Adrian and the Django devs!

For all those extreme programmers out there (e.g. Eric), Stubble is a “set of tools which can be used to simplify Python unit testing code by means of the responsible use of so-called stub classes”.

Unit tests (and other tests) are covered in Chapter 16 of the Apress Beginning Python book. I didn’t quite get there yet, but I can certainly see the value in unit tests.

The latest version of Python has been released to the masses. No new features, but a lot of bug squashing:

Python 2.4 is now in bugfix-only mode, no new features are being added. At least 50 bugs have been squashed since Python 2.4.2, including a number of bugs and potential bugs found by Coverity.

You can check out the release notes if you want the details.

Earlier today Ed Singleton said that he thought a Python tutorial wiki would be a good idea:

This would be a perfect situation for a wiki. I think it would be a good experiment to have a wiki containing the documentation (separate from the main documentation and clearly marked experimental for the moment), and to see if it did self-organise as wikis often do.

A few hours later, Fredrik Lundh gets one up and running… (An Unofficial) Python Tutorial Wiki.

Now that’s fast! As he says, “so, what are you waiting for? organize!”

PyWeather is a package that covers all of your meteorological needs. It includes conversion equations, console readers, and observation publishers. Now, this isn’t your typical “scrape data from Accuweather” type module. This is for actual first-hand weather monitoring and publishing, if you are in to that sort of thing.

You can grab the documentation as HTML or PDF.

I’m a huge fan of IPCop. It’s a great firewall distro that makes administration a snap using a slick web interface. My goal was to use IPCop and an easy-to-use VPN client to allow access to my LAN while away from home.

I ended up going with the ZERINA OpenVPN addon for IPCop and the OpenVPN GUI for Windows.

If you’ve ever wanted full, secure, encrypted access to your LAN from any remote location, here is your guide.

Just follow these ten easy steps…

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