PyCon Day 2

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.