Niall's Weblog

Recently I needed to implement my own autocomplete for a project on snagmachine.com. We had a large database of products and wanted to ease data entry by hinting to the user via autocomplete when possible.

In future, we can probably just use Freebase Suggest but right now we needed our own solution.
The Pieces
Autocomplete is not [...]

Pylons makes it super easy to return data to a client. You just return a string from your controller method!

class HelloController(BaseController):
 
def index(self):
return ‘Hello World!’

Very nice. However, what if you want to serve up a potentially quite large file to the client? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]