March 25, 2006

Settle Up with Sony

The Electronic freedom Foundation is trying to ensure that Sony Corporation provides reparations to anyone who inadvertently installed the rootkit software on their computer.

EFF is a body well worth knowing about and supporting. They prosecuted a class action suit against Sony BMG, and if you want to get in on the settlement now is the time.

Find out how to get your share.

March 11, 2006

Sun on the Run?

Talking, as I have been recently, about marketing, it was interesting to see a report of Sun's James Gosling apparently going negative at a recent education and research conference. In politics, and by extension in marketing, typically the frontrunner starts going negative when they perceive their lead is threatened. It's also interesting to see him breaking a cardinal rule and mentioning "the opposition" by name -- he's a techie at heart. Even though Python is mentioned only once in the article I linked to, we should be grateful for the free publicity.

Another significant feature of the report is that although Python is mentioned with a number of other languages, it's the other languages that are then dissed, leaving Python to suffer by association. Putting all this in context, though, Gosling's remarks were actually made in response to a question from an audience member.

The link I pointed you to makes it looks like Gosling's whole purpose was to defend his products against competing languages, when in fact that was far from reality. So another lesson is "don't believe everything you read in the papers (or on the web, for that matter)". The reporters have their own agenda, which is to spice things up and make them look like they're worth reading. They want your eyeball-seconds!

Just the same, I think it's revealing how Gosling chose to respond to the question. He's obviously feeing some sort of pressure from Python and its kind. I've given my own opinions on his language before, so I'll content myself with reiterating that this defensive response, coupled with a complete absence of objective criticism, can only be good news for Python.

March 8, 2006

A Little Marketing Effort

To follow up my last effort, I've created an evangelistic Squidoo lens. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

March 5, 2006

Marketing? Why Do You Use Python?

Well, the cat's among the pigeons and no mistake. Guido van Rossum recently received an email from John Sirbu that was basically a plea for more Python evangelism, to counteract the percieved successes of Ruby on Rails (RoR). Guido chose to republish this on his Artima blog under the title Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come, although the word "marketing" doesn't appear in the original email.

Now, I happen to believe in this case that Guido is right, and that Python would indeed benefit from some serious marketing activity. Unfortunately it appears that the storm of responses (the count was almost at 70 last time I looked) has been generated mostly by people who have little or no idea what marketing is, and if they did would probably hold up their hands in horror and run away screaming "shameless commerce".

Some respondents appeared to find the whole idea of marketing offensive, and in so far as that's what led to Java's current popularity I can agree, because I happen to feel that Java has cost the industry a lot of money with its unnecessary straightjacket (see Java is Object-Oriented COBOL). But most people who took up the cudgels by commenting on Guido's blog (I deliberately avoided doing so myself) simply roll out the many reasons why Python is technically superior to Ruby/Perl/Java/my favourite language. These people are even more clueless than me about what drives the adoption of a programming language.

The key insights into promotion by marketing come from the realisation that you don't sell people things by focusing on the features of your product -- you have to explain the benefits instead. Sell the sizzle, as they say, and not the sausage. Anyone who is seriously interested in promoting Python should view Seth Godin's video presentation in the "Google Author Series". Seth is a marketing professional with a long history in the high-tech world, and his blog is worth keeping an eye on for occasional flashes relevant to the technical world. A valuable insight from the presentation is that word-of-mouth is the most effective way to promote anything: what we need is to tell everyone who asks (and even people who don't) how effectively Python can meet their needs. Clients aren't interested in whether I'm using Python, as long as I can help them solve their problems cost-effectively and in acceptable time.

This puts me in mind of a recent thread on comp.lang.python which started out as a discussion on whether it was a good idea to talk about Python as an interpreted language. Before it devolved into the inevitable discussion about what exactly constituted an interpreter and how all languages were interpreted because the CPU interprets instructions (c.l.py is sometimes an object lesson on topic diversion), there was a huge discussion about whether using the word interpreted to describe the language would engender negative perceptions.

From a marketing point of view, it really doesn't matter whether Python is an interpreted language or not. People want to know whether it's an effective way to solve their problems, so while interpreted is insignificant to meaningless from the point of view of many adopters, widely portable might not be. Of course the feature (interpreted) and the benefit (widely portable) are opposite sides of the same coin, but the difference in emphasis is crucial from a promotional point of view. Ultimately a potential adopter wants to know "What's in it for me?"

From a marketing point of view it seems to me that some of the most important aspects of the Python language are as follows:
  • Easy to learn
  • Easy to apply to a wide variety of problems
  • Installed on every significant operating system
  • Great networking support
  • Large applications base to draw from
  • Vibrant, helpful community
  • Integrates easily with other languages
  • Excellent literature from a range of publishers
Note that here I haven't mentioned any language features at all, but the points should be interesting to anyone considering adopting Python because they speak to the user's needs. There are doubtless other benefits, that I hope readers can help me add to the list. Clearly all these things have to be true to be effective in marketing the language, and also there musn't be equally important disbenefits that haven't been mentioned - if Python enthusiasts tried to encourage adoption by lying about the language, even by omission, that would quickly become counter-productive.

One current problem seems to be that a lot of Python enthusiasts in the web world are concerned that another language (another rule of thumb: don't mention the competition by name) is getting more than its fair share of the buzz. They are trying to counter that buzz by focusing on Python's technical superiorities, without realising that the adopters of the "competition" aren't bothered about technical issues. They have found a solution for a range of problems, and they are adopting it to solve those problems.

It may be that as they try to extend those solutions they will come to realise that their adopted technology doesn't have the depth to extend in all the ways they want it. At that point the Python needs to be ready to reiterate the benefits of Python, and to show how it can be used to extend their existing solutions rather than forcing them to reqrite from scratch. Since the web world is already well-used to mixed-language and mixed-technology solutions this should be a breeze.

Ultimately the point of this blog is to try and help Python users to become more effectve advocates for their favourite language. We have a vested interest in seeing Python more widely used, so let's forget the features when we're discussing "Why Python" and focus on the benefits.

March 4, 2006

Snakes on the Web [Django How-to]

The third speaker for my session as chair was Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the two primary developers of Django. He took as his example a sudoku solver, explaining that his company had been paying $180 per week for a third-party service to provide sudoku puzzles, so there was a potential saving here of $8,000 per annum.

The Django application stack is Model/URL/View/Template. Jacob explained he was going to walk us through the whole stack in developing the application. Many people are surprised to see the URL in there, but hey, that's how the app interfaces with the real world.

All models inherit from django.core.meta.model, and you can easily give your application an online production-ready admin interface by creating a META class with an admin class attribute. The model describes much more than just the database structure. A class can have a validator list, in which case all validators must return true.

The applications used Eppstein's well-known PADS algorithm to generate sudoku puzzles. This creates a puzzle and saves it in a database. The database layer is explicitly called, nothing ever happens without a specific API call, as opposed to other object-relational mappers that perform database I/O autonomically.

URL patterns are established to determine which URL calls what piece of view functionality. When a request is submitted get_validation_errors() will return a dict of errors. Callable returns render_to_response(template, context).

The Django templating language is relatively simple, and this was a deliberate design choice. It was primarly so that technically unsophisticated users in the newspaper production environment would find it straightforward and intuitive.

Jacob continued the development of his example by adding a further model for solving puzzles, walking through the solution provided by the PADS algorithm.

Django applications area pretty much pluggable, so if you have Django running all you need to do is download the code, add it to sys.path, add sudoku to INSTALLED_APPS, include the URLs for sudoku somewhere in the mapping (an inclusion mechanism allows the inclusion of a bunch of URLs with a single pattern match, and ths feature extends to multiple levels). Finally use django-admin to install sudoku.

Tadaa! Once again an effective demonstration of a Python-based web technology that people should be adopting in droves.

Effective AJAX with TurboGears

Kevin Dangoor is the leader of the TurboGears project. This was the second in the session that I chaired. I was lucky in drawing excellent speakers for my session, and I was very glad I got the chance to hear this talk.

Do I need Ajax? Kevin felt the answer to this questions is "probably yes"! The web is becoming hugely interactive, and people are getting used to sites being much less passive than they have been. Gmail is two years old, and it has forced the pace. Nowadays 95% of the world uses one of three browser platforms, and toolkits are available to smooth over the differences (the two specifically mentioned were Dojo and mochikit).

Rather than present the dry theory behind AJAX Kevin then focused on the question of interest to many web developers: "How can I use it"? He gave several interesting examples based on TurboGears, but it would be easy to adapt them to other environments.

Data entry: this hasn't traditionally been a friendly task on the web. To choose between thousands of items a pick list is not appropriate: real-time searching is helpful here (the example selected from thousands of items by restricting those displayed in a pulldown to partial matches). People are used to auto-complete fields, so they quickly adapt to this behavior in web applications.

Realtime updates: AJAX can continually poll the server for updated information. This can capture simultaneous edits to the same data (the example informed an editor in real-time that someone else had changed the data they were currently working on).

Ordered lists: AJAX can be used to detect drops in drag-and-drop operations and reorder the data directly in the browser window (this time a very nice drag-and-drop example was presented).

There are also things we can do that confuse the users: people like the way their browsers work, and expect other applications to work the same way. Ajax reduces the value of the browser "back" button, and Dojo has provided a solution, but another solution is to not use AJAX! (I'm always encouraged when a speaker doesn't try to present their topic as a universal panacea). Users want to be able to bookmark the current state of their web application, and again Dojo can help to solve this problem by changing the location bar along the way. It's also possible to make controls behave in ways people don't expect: using radio buttons to submit information is generally a bad idea (examples of each faulty behavior were presented, as warnings of what not to do).

Summary: know your users - with a small user base you can train people if it helps improve their productivity, but this won't work with a large user base. Don't break what people expect to work, as they have invested a lot of time in learning the expected and customary interface behaviors.

With Guido's recent plea for more effective Python marketing I think this talk was a poster-child for what might be done. It focused on practical needs and gave clearly comprehensible examples, with the underlying code to diminish fears of complexity. If we can show people Python being used in this way they will flock to use it.

Everything About Web Programming (except Programming)

This session was the first of three where I did my PyCon duty and chaired a session. I was glad Ian Bicking's talk was included as I'd been unable to record his earlier session. Ian suggested that the focus of his talk was on "accepting my inner sysdadmin".

Imaginary Landscape is a small company with, like many small companies, vague division of responsibilities. Ian wears two hats: the programmer (who likes to write new things) and the sysadmin (who would rather redeploy well-understood software). Conway's Law applies: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

The company got where they are via Zope 2 development - which "felt a lot like PHP", with no overall process. So they moved into Webware and Subversion - but again without an overall plan. Things moved into production without a definite transition.

Deployment was stressful, so they decided to stop deploying! Applications were "multi-customer", and rather than developing good tools they would build complex applications. Ian now realises this was dumb, though it seemed smarter at the time. Unfortunately it meant that since everyone got the same software customization was infeasible, and configuration data had to go into the database, with no SVN control. Deployment should be easier than that, and simple deployment obviates the need for multi-customer applications: each customer can receive their own code.

Paste is a toolset that takes advantage of standard Subversion layout, providing a skeletal setup.py file and database model and a basic framework of templates and internally-used metadata. Testing also starts with a basic model created by the tool. Functional tests are really important: even just knowing that you can access the root page of an application is a worthwhile test.

Sometimes it can be problematic developing web applications in a test-driven environment. Developing code without opening it in a browser sounds cool, but it turns out that it's too easy to overlook gaping holes in an application (like there's no link to a page that the test framework has been accessing directly). This level of purity turns out to be too extreme in practice.

Configuration data is essential to a project, and it's important to differentiate between program configuration as usedby programmers and application configuration as used by system administrators. The tool creates a template for the deployment configuratiom file. Client data is kept in separate repositories, not int he application, and controlled separately from the application code.

Deployment uses the buildutils, and installation is moving towards a two-stage process. The first step installs the configuration file and the second step sets the application up in line with that configuration. Setuptools has the ability to install multiple versions of the same product, but this turned out not to be useful, as the separation between the versions wasn't sufficiently clean.

Ian now feels that "the computer" is a very poor context for installation of anything at all. ("Site-packages considered harmful"). So each site gets its own Python environment in development, and they use sitecustomize code to configure aaccording to the ACTIVE_SITE environment variable.

A nicely-focused talk with some valuable lessons for us all.

RIP Meerkat

Well, I just discovered that the end of an era is upon us.

For a long time now the holdenweb.com site has had news links extracted automatically from O'Reilly's meerkat system. Because the site generation code is still under test I only periodically click a button in its interface that says "Update News", and today for the first time I got a traceback from xmlrpclib complaining about 302 server status.

The redirect (which should really be permanent) is to a page that says
Update: Meerkat was shut down March 2, 2006
No reasons, just that bald statement. Since meerkat was an early exemplar in the web services field I thought it would be appropriate to mark its passing.

Now I have to get serious about a replacement. I have for some time been tweaking a feed extractor using Mark Pilgrim's excellent FeedParser module, so that's now moving up the priority list.

The underlying database is still Access, and so this morning I used DBManager Professional to convert it to PostgreSQL. Still needs changes, but I'm happy to say that at least I managed to generate a local copy of the site with no errors.