A EuroPython impression, part II

After the lunch, on the first day of the conference itself,  there was an excellent talk about copyrights and the impact of that for us as Python developers by Cory Doctorow. Reinout van Rees wrote an excellent report of this on his weblog.

Some effort was made to have a live video feed with Guido van Rossum. The facial expression of Guido on the stream was at least very funny, the conversation itself failed as we didn't had any audio. Next try is probably tomorrow.

Another interesting talk was about the FilterPype framework by Rob Collins, which is all about pipeline design patterns. Motivation of creating the framework was to simplify complicated processes into filters, like how the Unix piping system works. Implementation has been done using generators and coroutines, but it hides this implementation details for the users of the framework.

Pipelines have their own configuration language so that experts who need to create the pipelines do not have to program in Python. Check out the FilterPype website, as it is can be a nice framework for manipulating complicated data streams for example.

The Guardian has a interesting new approach for publishing their content so it's reusable by everyone who wants to use this content. One of the things they do now is that they publish data they collect (for example, all the bands and acts on Glastonburry) on a blog, so everybody can reuse that data as well. They also introduced a content API (for Python, but also for PHP and Ruby) so you can collect content in code pretty easily. There are some limits though, like you can query 5000 articles per day and you are not allowed to cache it longer for 24 hours. Anywho, other newspapers can take an example of at least trying to be innovative on the internet.

Last for today was the talk about Zope Page Templates by Matt Hamilton. There was some real interest in using the product, especially when people understood is could be used as a stand alone templating library without having the "Zope beast".

More coverage will follow tomorrow.