Meeting Summary: October 3, 2005

[Mike Pirnat]

Thanks to everyone who attended tonight's meeting, especially Ian for
his presentation on Django -- we covered quite a lot of material, and
the well-structured presentation really held together well. Thanks
also to Xteric for hosting us and providing munchies. And to everyone
new, thanks for joining us, it's great to see the group growing!

For those who couldn't make it, I recommend grabbing the presentation
off of Ian's site, or hopping over to the Django site to have a look
at the docs.

The recap goes a little something like this:

Social Time
* Pizza!
* Redhat vs. Gentoo vs. Debian: packaging system woes and joys
* David Stanek's adventures with Dvorak
* Intros around the room

Ian Maurer's Django Presentation
* http://itmaurer.com/blog/
* S5 - nifty CSS/javascript presentation system;
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
* Some Python intro for newcomers to the language
* Web frameworks abound! But finally we have some strong contenders...
* Django history
* http://djangoproject.com
* Installation
* Sample httpd.conf
* Models Views Templates (MVT) == MVC
* Creating a simple project
* Create project area
* Initialize project from global settings
* Create application(s)
* Define data models in code (similar to but not based on
SQLObject)
* Can be generated from an existing database
* Activate models
* Easy to interact with in the interactive shell
* Admin tool
* Lives as a separate app within your project
* Lots of great CRUD functionality for free, just by setting
up a project
* Interface driven by META class info in the model
* Provides history of admin tool usage
* User & group controls
* Data entry
* Create public interface
* URL structure
* unlike other frameworks, you have very flexible control
over this
* Use regular expressions to map URL structure to modules
* Parses URL bits into variables for your view
* Views (aka Controllers)
* Tell models and templates what to do with themselves
* Named data passed to template system in "context"
dictionary (similar to Kid, others) to be rendered
* Shortcuts to reduce boilerplate
* get_object_or_404()
* render_to_response()
* Templates
* Again, you have choices: Django built-in system, ZPT,
Cheetah, etc.
* These don't go under your publicly exposed docroot!
* Uses double curly-braces to set off vars: {{ foo.bar }}
* Variables come from the context passed by the
view/controller
* Can do filters: {{ foo.bar|upper }}
* Tags for control flow, basic programming functionality:
{% if blah %} ... {% endif %}
* See author's guide for lots lots more
* See developer's guide if you still need more
* Template inheritance, multiple levels
* Other items of interest
* Generic views -- for rapid prototyping
* Caching framework
* Forms, fields, and manipulators
* Request & response objects
* Sessions
* Discussion
* Templating system - "okay", could look weird to designers; ZPT or
Kid could be cleaner for non-developer designers (Dreamweaver,
Homesite, etc.)
* Caching framework - slick, can do per-page caching on a view,
using decorator syntax or method call syntax -- could possibly
break app into multiple small view bits, caching some/all
independently
* A number of sites using Django in production (links on django's
homepage)

Next Time
* Meeting will be at AG
* First Monday of November: 11/07/2005
* TurboGears presentation from Mike Pirnat (if I can get my act
together in a timely fashion)

FYI
* This Saturday, October 8: TurboGears sprint in Ann Arbor, MI --
Road trip! David Stanek and Mike Pirnat will be going -- anyone else?
* Matt Wilson has volunteered to do a presentation on PyGame in the
semi-distant future (in 3-4 months or so)


Cheers,

Mike

--
Mike Pirnat
mpi...@gmail.com

[David Noyes]

Awesome notes mike! It helps out for the weak, such as myself, who didn't go. :D

[Ian Maurer]

Thanks Mike for the great notes and thanks to everyone for the
questions. It was a fun time.

Can't wait til the next meeting....

ian