Niall's Weblog

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 [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks ago I needed a designer to produce some HTML/CSS and Photoshop templates for a web project I’m working on. While I have good working knowledge of HTML and CSS, I am not very interested nor efficient at working with it. And even worse, I’m quite poor at coming up with graphic designs. [...]

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 [...]

This article is a followup to my previous post, Facebook apps in Python and Pylons part 1. I’m going to talk a little more about what is interesting about Facebook apps and how they work in practice. At the end, I provide a little code sample and a convenience decorator to save you some hassle. [...]