Ideas for next month's Python Web Development Meeting

[Ray Finzel]

Hi all,

Peter had suggested brainstorming/organizing ideas for next month's webdev meeting, and I just happened to be on super late enough to notice that that hadn't happened yet.

What were the good ideas tossed around at the meeting?



My contribution to the idea pool would be to expand upon the idea of "rolling your own" framework as a learning exercise, maybe getting lightning talks about each of the fundamental components of a framework (excluding the "glue" itself), and demoing some use cases.

I would volunteer to talk about ORMs a bit ( though I don't profess to be an expert, or anything more than novice lvl 1 ), since I picked up peewee for a project a while back. Maybe my mistakes could start some good discussion.



Ray

[Derek Anderson]

I know that maybe this week was way too deep for some people getting started. I like the idea of building an App. I suggest we start with a vanilla Django App.

We can walk through getting a django app running inside a vanilla virtualenv, and then start going through creating the model(s) for the PyMNtos Library App.

Go through creating views, django generated forms, form validation, form saving, some simple django apps like django-registration, binding models to the Admin UI, some simple things to make a single purpose web app.

If there is time this month we could walk through uploading and modifying settings.py for heroku deploy (or similar).

Thoughts?

[Ray Finzel]

Peter on meetup.com:

"The next meeting in December looks like we'll be doing something more interactive. At the end of the meeting last night, somebody suggested that we start at the beginning by building a simple web application and then said a PyMNtos library app would be a great idea."

Does the community have any ideas of how to format the meetings with a topic like this?

On Wednesday, November 6, 2013 4:13:02 AM UTC-6, Ray Finzel wrote:

[Derek Anderson]

Here is a great Flask tutorial written by Python Author Katie Cunningham. 

https://github.com/kcunning/flask-class

She is building this for her local PyLadies DC meetup. It's nice because she has an outline, as well as commit history build up.

Derek

[Peter J. Farrell]

Wow, all great ideas for the web dev group meeting in December.  For those of you that didn't stick around at the end, we kicked around some other ideas.

One idea was to build a simple library application for our new PyMNtos library.  I really like this idea because its something good for the group, a great learning experience and the knowledge domain is small but approachable (everybody knows the basics of a library system so no special domain knowledge is needed).

Simple:

* Borrowers
* Catalog
* Checkout History / Status

More advanced / future ideas:

* Integrate with Meetup API to let any group member be an automatic borrower therefore not needing yet another account. Meetup.com actually maintains an official Python API library (https://github.com/meetup/python-api-client)
* Email reminders maybe through a place like SendGrid (they have a 200 free emails per day plan)
* Hosting on Heroku

For technologies / libraries, I'd like to suggest the following -- some for simplicity and convenience:

* Django (along with the normal South, Pip, etc.)
* Meetup.com API
* Bootstrap for a CSS framework / design (they way we don't have to focus on an unique design, which isn't the point in something like this)
* Hosting on Heroku (free for one dyno) with a developers Postgres DB, SendGrid for email SMTP service, which we would have such low usage that we could easily use the free plans for all of these things

If we built this over a few meeting and do at home hacking as a group, we could then use the design and we could swap out Django and port to a micro-framework like Flask.  I believe this is a better route than Flask first. Django will allow us to gloss over some items -- let them be magical -- and keep the concepts as simple as possible.  This way we can focus on architecture / design and not worry about things like SQL (ORM), advanced CSS (covered by bootstrap), hosting (Heroku is dead simple).

For example, those that don't do much SQL -- having to write queries and manage everything else can be hard all at once.  After we get some stuff under people's belts, it would nice to use Flask and SQLAlchemy so people can appreciate what an ORM does and what it doesn't.

Another round after Flask is to port things over to Google App Engine.  SQL would be replaced with BigTable, etc.

For December I'd be willing to get a Git repo setup on GitHub (open an official PyMNtos group) and get people on that.  At the meeting we can map out our domain (I have a nice big portable whiteboard for prototyping) and get organized.  I'd also like people to volunteer to blog what we did at the meetings.  Maybe very interested people would like to volunteer to be project manager, UI consultant, etc.

What do people think?  Let's keep talking here.  I'd like to have a good plan in order by our main meeting Thursday so we can announce it.

.pjf



Derek Anderson said the following on 11/08/2013 08:10 AM:

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[David Fawcett]

As the person who piped up and suggested a more concrete meeting, I thought that I should speak up...

I think that this is a great approach!  +1 on all of Peter's suggestions above.  I also like the fact that instead of building the front end to the 'my record collection' Hello World database application, we will be building an app that we need. 

For those of you who are pretty new to Django (like me), I suggest working through the official 'Writing your first Django app' tutorial at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/intro/tutorial01/  I did most of it yesterday and it is a great introduction to Django and the Django flavor of MVC. 

I like the addition of hosting on Heroku and putting the repo on Github.  That will add some good practical skills to help people get their own 'My First Django' project out on the World Wide Web.

David.

[Peter Farrell]

Good to hear that so far I'm not crazy!

I was thinking that git and github is not only important because it is version control and nobody want to hand zips around but the only way to deploy to Heroku is by using git remotes.

Let's chat on Thursday and we can organize for Dec a bit

[Kurt Wiersma]

As a someone who is working on my first django app on weekends I am really excited to participate in this. I think it will be fun to also learn how to use git to deploy to Heroku as well as use github to collaborate on an open source project.

--Kurt

[Peter J. Farrell]

Kurt Wiersma said the following on 11/13/2013 03:45 PM:

As a someone who is working on my first django app on weekends I am really excited to participate in this. I think it will be fun to also learn how to use git to deploy to Heroku as well as use github to collaborate on an open source project.

Great!  I just setup a brand new Django / Django CMS from nothing to Heroku in under 8 hours this past week.  This included building some custom stuff to get company news from a stock newswire service and stock prices which were all implemented as Django CMS custom plugins.  So I'm glad people are interested in Heroku stuff

I setup an organizational GitHub group for us:

https://github.com/pymntos

If you want to work on our up coming web dev project, please send me your GitHub username so I can add you to the project.

[Ray Finzel]

Hey Peter, I'll be there. Github: rfinz

[Ray Finzel]

Hi all, notes for the meeting are up at https://github.com/PyMNtos/stacks/wiki/December.

I also added a blank page for the Installation readme that we discussed creating in the meeting.

A few nights ago I added a footer that contains a few helpful links for people who are interested in contributing to the Wiki, so read up if you don't know much about Markdown or the Gollum wiki engine.

See ya'll soon!

On Wednesday, November 6, 2013 4:13:02 AM UTC-6, Ray Finzel wrote:

[Kyle Marek-Spartz]

The flask app I put together has no views yet, as I’ve gotten distracted with other things, but if interested, I can add that as another repo here.

Make sure to discuss the meaning of the license enough to mention the freedoms and restrictions that the GPL has, so as not to scare people away, but also so as to not cause problems for people who didn’t understand the implications. I could see some people new to django using this as a template for a other applications, but the new application would be a derivative work.

-- 
Kyle Marek-Spartz

[Kyle Marek-Spartz]

Here it is: https://github.com/zeckalpha/library

Still no views, but the structure is there.

-- 
Kyle Marek-Spartz