TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - First official meeting recap

TuPLE (Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts) is off to a good start. Our first official meeting went well, with 6 attending.

Chris Merle started us off with an overview of Plone and two products that help to
inspect and interrogate the python objects in use:
DocFinderTab
DocFinderTab adds a tab to the ZMI that parses the docstrings of the class of the object you are using and presents them to you in the tab.
Clouseau
Clouseau embeds a live ajax based python interpreter into your plone site for debugging purposes. It looks to have some nice autocompletion features and lets you poke around the internals of a live instance.

Chris then demoed his news portlet modification that shows an excerpted portion of the news items (vs just the title and link), and explained how DocFinderTab and Clouseau both helped him determine which object attributes were going to be useful for displaying the content.

We had some good conversation about general interests, IDEs, reference books, and what kinds of presentations everyone is interested in. Django, advanced python, and C extensions are heading up the list for the future.

Misc. Notes:

• Civilization 4 allows mod authors to use Python to modify aspects of
  the game. Hopefully we'll hear more about it in the future.
• PyScripter - Free Windows Editor/IDE
• Core Python (http://corepython.com/) was recommended as a good
  reference, others thought the online docs were adequate.
• A couple of members are repeat pycon attendees. This year we'll have 2
  or 3 attending. April's meeting will be good for a pycon recap.
  
• A python obfuscation tool was discussed
  

Thanks to Chris for presenting and everyone for attending!