Fifth SoCal Piggies meeting

The SoCal Piggies had their fifth meeting at USC on July 21st at 7:00 PM. Six Piggies attended -- Daniel Arbuckle, Diane Trout, Steve Williams, Mark Kohler, Grig Gheorghiu and Brian Leair.

Grig presented an overview of the py library, a collection of modules that intend to address several issues with the Python standard library. The py lib's mantra is "No API", which means it aims to be as simple to use and as "pythonic" as possible, while avoiding the F word ("Framework"). Grig talked mostly about py.test, and then briefly presented greenlets, py.xml and py.log. Hopefully he managed to convince the attendants to give the py lib a try.

We obviously also talked about Django, the hottest new thing since sliced bread in Python land. Daniel said he gave it a try, but he found the installation much harder than CherryPy's, so for now he's sticking with the latter. We went around the room in search of topics for future presentations, and fortunately it looks like there's no shortage of subjects: wxWindows, PIL, matplotlib, decorators, sets, and the list goes on.

We also briefly toyed with and solved the first 2 challenges of the Python Challenge, just to see how it feels to code together as a group. It was fun, so maybe we'll dedicate a future meeting to a coding session, be it the Python Challenge or other problems that can be solved in max. 1 hour.

Many thanks to Daniel for hosting the meeting and to Diane for bringing the projector.

The next meeting will be at USC again, with the date tentatively set to August 18th. Topics for next meeting:

• Demo of an interactive multi-player game written as a Python CGI application, with some AJAX thrown in (Charlie Hornberger)

• Presentation/demo of a commercial wxWindows-based Python application (Steve Williams)