Niall's Weblog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recently I have been working on a pretty simple Facebook application. I’ve found that the tough thing about writing a Facebook app is not the app per se, but figuring out what a Facebook app actually is, and how it is supposed to work! Anyway, I’m hoping to shed some light on the [...]

Pylons ships with Beaker, which provides some very useful caching functionality. While there are a bunch of ways to use it, I like the handy decorator, @beaker_cache. To use it, simply wrap up your response-generating function call like so:

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from pylons.decorators.cache import beaker_cache
class MyController(BaseController):
# …
@beaker_cache(expire=600, type=’memory’)
[...]