PySIG meeting of 28 September 2006: Byte codes and TurboGears

Ten folks attended the September Python Special Interest Group and  
munched on cookies from Janet.

I mc'ed the meeting as Bill had the first of two presentations. We  
hurried through a quick set of announcements, including the upcoming  
GBC ACM AJAX event, CentraLUG, DLSLUG and Hosstraders. Bill talked  
about a gotcha about tuples being immutable lists and we agreed...  
it's still a gotcha.

Bill presented Python byte codes and shows how the dis module could  
be used to disassemble the byte code produced from a python module:

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-dis.html

and showed the constants. kent pointed out that the byte code map  
changes a bit from version to version, and is probably completely  
inapplicable for PyPy and Jython. Bill also showed off the byteplay  
module, which allows manipulation of the byte codes:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/ByteplayDoc

Our second presentation was by Lloyd Kvam of Venix Corp in Lebanon.  
Lloyd presented TurboGears, a web framework for Python which combines  
modules like CherryPy web functions, Kid templating, SQLobjects  
(optionally, SQLAlchemy) Objection-Relational Mapper with TurboGears  
providing the glue (via decorators) to create web applications. Lloyd  
ran into troubles getting the X server on his laptop to synch with  
the projector, so we had an impromptu lesson on X-forwarding and  
learned what a strange key mapping Bill Sconce keeps on his laptop.  
Thanks to everyone present for their patience and ingenuity in  
getting it to work and to Lloyd for picking up where he left off. We  
got to look at a fair amount of code and got some ideas what the  
framework can do.

http://www.turbogears.org for more info.

Thanks to Lloyd and Bill for their presentations, to Janet for the  
cookies, and to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the  
great facilities!

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com