Ionrock Dot Org

Today was the first day of PyCon! Ian Bicking gave an introduction to WSGI that rather gracefully side stepped the recently discussed harmful middleware. What he did make clear was that middleware acts as both a application and a server, which I think really makes clear what middleware truly is on a very basic level. There was also a Web Framework Panel that had some interesting discussion and helped to reveal some of the different philosophies of the different frameworks. CherryPy was very well represented by non-other than Robert Brewer who made it clear that folks should focus on using the right tool for the right job. While everyone really had good points and the preceived jabs between frameworks was somewhat fun to watch, Robert proved to be the most elegant panelist (IMHO) by giving concise insight into why CherryPy is such a great project.

Outside of the web development world was an amazing discussion on iterators. This coupled with the keynote regarding OLPC makes it clear I need to get my act together on the mathmatics front. The iterator discussion mentioned itertools,

which I found out was written in C. Now I really hadn't even heard of itertools outside of seeing it in some of Uche's, so it was good to get a rather general overview (even if I barely understood it). I'll be taking a closer look at it this evening as I figure out some interesting idea to hack on.

That is pretty much it for day one. I did sit in on the state of Zope but it kind of felt like both Zope and Plone were both depressed feeling old in light of the current state of things. I don't believe that Zope is dead, but it makes me wonder what its future is since it seems there aren't very many developers and the project leaders are rather frustrated. I think the user base has a lot to do with its continued progress and as Zope 3 continues, I would imagine that the community might become more active (not that I know anything about the Zope community).

Overall, it is a good time with way too many ideas and applications that need hacking!