Webware for Python 1.0

Christoph Zwerschke has just announced:

The historic Webware for Python version 1.0 has finally been released. It runs with all Python versions from 2.0 to 2.6.

A lot of bugs have been fixed, and a few small improvements and changes have been made since the last release. See the release notes for WebKit, MiddleKit, TaskKit, CGIWrapper and DBUtils for details.

Webware for Python is a suite of Python packages and tools for developing object-oriented, web-based applications. The suite uses well known design patterns and includes a fast Application Server, Servlets, Python Server Pages (PSP), Object-Relational Mapping, Task Scheduling, Session Management, and many other features. Webware is very modular and easily extended.

Webware for Python is well proven and platform-independent. It is compatible with multiple web servers, database servers and operating systems.

DBUtils is a suite of tools providing solid, persistent and pooled connections to a database that can be used in all kinds of multi-threaded environments like Webware for Python or other web application servers. The suite supports DB-API 2 compliant database interfaces and the classic PyGreSQL interface.

Check out the Webware for Python home page at http://www.w4py.org.

I was the original author and founder of this open source project back in 2000. Over the years we attracted several contributors and many users. Ultimately, I left and turned to Cobra. Chris took over the Webware project and has done a smash up job supporting users and improving the code base. I still use Webware on multiple projects that date back to the early 2000's and I'd use it again on any Python project.

Congratulations to Chris and the Webware community!

Cobra October Update

Cobra has a new "install-from-workspace" script that is quite handy, and I've posted a Cobra October Update in the discussion forums.

SoCal Piggies Meeting Tonight

I'll be attending the SoCal Piggies Meeting tonight at Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, CA (Los Angeles area).

Tonight's agenda:

Michał Kwiatkowski: "Automatic generation of unit tests with Pythoscope"

Joe Shochet (lead game designer and programmer on Disney's Toontown Online): "How we use Python in Toontown"

See http://socal-piggies.org/

smallworks

I recently met Chris Berg, the chair and founder of smallworks.org. This site aims to offer free services to non-profit organizations that might not otherwise have the funds or the know how to make good use of software technology. Unlike the open source approach, smallworks is oriented towards providing the end software as a service to users rather than as a package or code base to developers.

Overall, it's a good idea, but I think smallworks would benefit from opening up so that others could contribute to the code base. Cobra has certainly benefited from going open source earlier this year.

Smallworks is web-based in order to avoid installation headaches and to achieve its goal to connect givers and receivers. There appears to be a lot of work still to do on the site, but it'll be interesting to see how smallworks evolves in the future.

Cobra 0.8 Is Out

Cobra 0.8 is out now. Get it from the downloads page (there are packages for Windows and Unix-like systems). Bugs that blocked the usage of GTK# and Tao have been fixed, so it'll be interesting to see what people do with Cobra and those libraries.

If you haven't discovered the forums yet, check 'em out.

I haven't been blogging much because I've been way too busy working on the compiler in response to feedback. While "1.0" is still a long way off, I feel like I can breathe a bit easier with these various improvements in place. Feedback for Cobra has been largely positive, and it's getting better as Cobra matures.

Tonight I reviewed How to Learn Cobra to see if it needed an update. While it still exhibits the most uninspired page layout possible, the content is totally legit. If you follow the steps, you will definitely become a Cobra coder.

Forums and Press Coverage

InfoWorld has covered Cobra with a general overview and a catchy title.

But I would have preferred "Cobra is faster and more deadly than Python".   :-)

And discussion forums are up! This is the main place for all Cobra discussion. After registering, check for your verification email in both your in-box and your spam folder.

New Cobra

I thought January's release of Cobra would be a 0.0.1 increment, but the progress was substantial enough to call it "0.7". See for yourself in the release notes and get yourself a copy!

In other news:

I added a section that I had forgotten in the Comparison to Python about how Cobra defaults to accurate arithmetic. Adding 0.1 to itself 10 times does not equal 0.999999...

There is a new sample that implements a FORTH interpreter. It needs a lot more work, but it's a good start with support for word definitions.

In less than 10 hours I fly out to Washington for Lang.NET 2008. I'm looking forward to geeking out about languages, compilers, interpreters and more. But I'm disappointed that the Spec# team won't be presenting as they did last time. Cobra also does contracts and I hope to integrate with their static analysis tool at some point.

Getting back to the Cobra language and compiler, I fell shy of the necessary clean up to open the source code, but I'm getting close. So when I get back the plans are:

• Open the source code some time in February. (MIT license)


• Install Trac for issue tracking and wiki.


• Set up discussion forums.


• Get new blogging software?

And then it's on to the next version!