Technical stuff

[pbouda]

Hi,

Richard already mentioned that we should set up a blog to post about
our ideas. I don't like Wordpress, though. Should we create a Django
based blog, so we can also learn more about Django? There are several
pre-made blog plugins for Django:

http://djangopackages.com/

For the repository it may make sense to restrict ourselves a bit, in
the first step. I would propose to target experiments based on IPython
first, because they have now I nice way how to seperate execution and
front-end. Take a look at the IPython notebook:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html

You have coding environment in the browser (implemented in
JavaScript), while (Python) code is executed on the server(s). Users
can also download code and execute locally. You add plots directly to
the notebook, with matplotlib. We may have a look how to integrate
IPython notebooks with VisTrails, but I don't have a clue how the
latter works.

IPython may be a good start because we can learn how to implement the
communication channel between a workflow system/experiment repository
and the servers that execute code. They did an amazing job, there.

Best,
Peter

[Richard Littauer]

I think a Django based blog sounds perfect. It should be a good learning experience. I especially think that using IPython as our first pipeline language is a good idea, if only for its mentioned interoperability. So, yes, let's do that. 

VisTrails may be a good workflow workbench to try and run code through, but I suspect that the majority of useful codes we'll be running into, developing, and selling will be packages comprised of individual scripts without GUIs.

I'll ping Liberman again about getting the IPython server, unless you've already gone ahead and done that Peter?

Richard 

[pbouda]

For our web app, the experiment repository, it may make sense to use
buildout:

http://www.buildout.org/
http://jacobian.org/writing/django-apps-with-buildout/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/djangorecipe/0.20

This seems to solve a lot of the problems I am having now with Python
web apps that are >1 year old and I want to share now with other
developers.

Best,
Peter

[Richard Littauer]

I think the repository sites you mention sound good, in the sense that it saves us having to type them up ourselves. I haven't had a chance yet to look at them in depth yet - uni just started up here and I've been a bit overloaded this week. Will try to do that once I have Django up and running.

Richard