TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - January 2010 recap

The Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts met Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1702 Pizza & Beer.

We had 8 attendees with 2 new faces (Welcome Jude and Leslie!)

We had 5 short-form "lightning talks" to kick off the new year.

• Generating PDFs with Reportlab (http://reportlab.org) - (Chris Niswander)
• Multiple ways to consume PDFs, with Reportlab being the best option for generating
• Using S5, Docutils, and reST to create web based slideshows (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html)  - (Chris Merle)
• Why I hate ORMs - (Scott Schanel)
• Lively discussion about the (mis)use of ORMs (Object Relational Mapper) to manage data access. Good arguments for using an existing, if imperfect, query language (SQL) and understanding the 'relation' in relational database.
• Django syndication. Generating Media RSS feeds from Photologue galleries - (Lucas Taylor)
• Django makes it trivial to generate RSS feeds and reasonably easy to create custom syndication formats. A demo application was presented showing multiple galleries using the CoolIris plugin for consuming the feeds.
• iftd, a multi-transport protocol file transfer program - (Jude Nelson)
• iftd is a data transfer daemon that allows clients to access files via a variety of transfer protocols (http, ftp, bittorrent, et al.). Protocol and error handling are encapsulated in the iftd daemon, freeing clients from having to perform these functions as it chooses the best available transfer protocol. It is a component of the Stork project at the University of Arizona.

At least 4 TuPLE members are planning to attend PyCon 2010 in Atlanta next month, so our March meeting will be a recap of the conference. February remains a mystery.