DFW Pythoneers, 2nd Sat: Topics We Covered

Here in Dallas we had our 2nd Saturday (April 12th) meeting at the Nerdbooks.com store. We covered a diverse set of topics, as follows:

• the Texas Python Community and regional conference planning
• the Pasta Theory of Software
• what is so bad about Potato Programming
• a New Edition of The Python Papers
  
• a survey of cool Twisted technologies, many not so well known
• Athena - a best-of-breed approach to developing interactive JavaScript (AJAX / Comet) applications
• Vertex - a better concept for a peer-to-peer technology
  
• Imaginary - simulation engine re role playing, interactive fiction, and multiplayer dungeons
• Mantissa - an application server over Axiom db, Nevow templating and Athena
  
• Axiom - an innovative database object relational mapper
  
• Nevow - template language, form processing and really cool STAN, a Pythonic DOM for XML
  
• talk and demo of the Google AppEngine
• The Decorator Module

Much of the time was on the Google AppEngine, the darling of the blogosphere at the moment. A couple of us managed to get accounts so we went through the demonstration site provided with the Google SDK, and create a trivial application at http://dfwpython.appspot.com. The AppEngine infrastructure allows one to grant development privileges to other people, so we opened this application up to experimentation by other user group members.

For more information about our group, check out our user group wiki.

-Jeff