Niall's Weblog

Last month I started Py Web SF, the San Francisco Python & Web Technology meet-up. The idea is 1-2 conversation-style presentations of about 30 minutes with a group of 10-20 people. My hope is to have a more intimate group than the very good Bay Piggies (which I highly recommend). With a small group, it [...]

I read today that Turbo Gears 2.0 has been released – at long last! I used Turbo Gears 1 briefly in 2007 for a small project then switched to Pylons. Pylons is pretty neat because its really a framework for building a framework. You can pick and choose WSGI middleware and slot it all together [...]

I’ve been playing with the recently-released HTTP API for accessing the Best Buy product catalog. While its a little strange to use at first, its actually pretty useful. One of the things I am interested in is online retail, specifically how to make Internet shopping easier. Lets imagine I am looking for information on a [...]

On ORMs It so happens that I end up dealing with the Python ORM SQLObject pretty often. I don’t really like ORMs very much, since in my experience they make those 80% of database things that are already easy to do with plain SQL easier, while making the other 20% of database things which are [...]

I wrote in a previous article about using SQLite with Pylons. SQLite is great for small-to-medium web projects and also prototyping. Its not very hard to port a SQLite implementation to a more robust and scalable RDBMS such as PostgreSQL. Anyway, if you have used SQLite in any capacity, you have no doubt noticed that [...]