Today is the second day of PyCon, and while I have enjoyed the talks I’ve attended, I’ll admit that a)I was a little preoccupied with my own presentation and b)I’m tired. The day started with a keynote by GvR on the future of Python. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting none the less. If anything, I was a little suprised the hear that while 2.4 is coming this summer (probably), 3.0 is a ways off. I guess I shouldn’t be suprised: the >= 2.3 series is incredibly powerful and featurful. I just thought 3.0 would have a more definite time table.
The morning was spent in the Zope track. Jim Fulton presented the Zope Development Roadmap, which wasn’t really anything new to me. Joel Burton’s presentation on PostgreSQL in Python and Zope was interesting in a peripheral sort of way. I don’t currentlyhave any plans to use PostgreSQL over MySQL, but he did have some “best practice” suggestions that Vern and I agreed would be good to roll into Stoa. Our presentation on the development of Stoa rounded out the morning.
As I predicted, we had no problem filling the half hour time slot, which was good: I knew I was going to talk fast because I was nervous, so people just assumed I was talking fast to stay within the time limit. A few interesting notes: I probably pissed off the Plone people when I declared that I couldn’t ever figure out how it would make my life better. I stand by that, but I had my ear bent after the presentation by enough people that I want to check it out again. Even though there were plenty of Plone supporters, most of them agreed: the state of Plone when we looked at it before probably did turn us off. I also had a couple of people approach me wanting to know where they could get the code. It will be available; soon. In general the reaction seemed positive, and I think we built some definite interest in Stoa as a project.
After lunch I attended Travis Hartwell’s session on Python and GTK. I was impressed with how little code is really necessary to build GTK interfaces. Of course, unless the non-X11 MacOS X port starts moving (and fast), I doubt I’ll use it much. wxPython, for all it’s warts and problems, stills does the best cross-platform GUIs I’ve seen. The rest of the time before the break was spent in lightning talks. These were generally interesting, especially Graham Fawcett’s presentation about Victor, a course management system he’s working on at the University of Windsor. He’s using Quixote, and it looks like the light-weigh approach has allowed him to build an impressive project quickly.
| date: | 2004-03-25 17:09:54 |
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| wordpress_id: | 102 |
| layout: | post |
| slug: | pycon-day-2 |
| comments: | |
| category: | geek |