Planet Jython

Last update: February 09, 2010 09:47 AM

February 03, 2010

I joined Sauce Labs as of January 3 this year. I met the people at Sauce Labs during the recent startup crawl in San Francisco (what a great way to find an employer, eh?). Sauce Labs is based around support for the open source Selenium functional testing framework. The inventor of Selenium, Jason Huggins is a founder. I joined Sauce Labs at the same time as Jim Baker and Raymond Hettinger, see here for more. The entire team at Sauce Labs is mind blowingly amazing - which is the main reason that I had to join.

As for the technology, there is a very cool Python backend that supports lots and lots of parallel virtual workloads. I am currently working on Sauce IDE, an extension of Selenium IDE that adds support for Sauce Lab's OnDemand service to the IDE. This lets you record your functional tests from Firefox, and then push those tests up to Sauce Labs where they can be run on various operating systems and browsers in parallel. How cool is that?

Readers of this blog are probably wondering what this means for my role as lead maintainer of Jython. First of all, this is nothing like my former role at Sun Microsystems. Jython is definitely not going to be my day job the way it was at Sun. Since Sauce Labs is an early stage startup, I will be very busy helping the company succeed. Having said that, Sauce Labs is a company based on the use of open source software, and has a strong commitment to giving back to the open source community. They support my continued involvement in the development of Jython. What this means in practice will need to evolve over time.

I'm pretty excited to switch focus from implementing a Python to putting Python code into production. I fully expect that this new job will deepen my understanding of real world Python coding and make my Jython work more productive.

February 03, 2010 02:23 PM

Josh Juneau

Jython Book - Working with the Sources

The open source version of 'The Definitive Guide to Jython' (aka: Jython book) is available online, both in restructuredText format and HTML via Sphinx. Apress was good enough to send me the final versions for all of our chapters and appendicies in MS-Word format. It is my task to convert them from MS Word format into restructuredText...which is a slow and sometimes painful process.

Overview of Conversion Process

1) Open the MS-Word document in Open Office (my preference) and remove headers and footers from each page

2) Save the document in open office format

3) Try to apply the apress_odt_to_rst.py script that was donated by James Gardner. If that doesn't work, then save document in HTML format and use pandoc to convert.

Command: pandoc -t rst filename.htm > filename.rst

4) Manually parse through each rst file and repair issues (and there are usually a lot...especially with code markup and tables)

Interested in building the sources?

If you are interested in building the sources, you can check the out from bitbucket.org at the following link: http://bitbucket.org/javajuneau/jythonbook/ and then build them using Sphinx

View the Open Source Book

If you'd like to simply view the open source book, it can be found at http://jythonbook.com in Sphinx format. We of course recommend that you purchase a copy of the book from Apress to keep handy as well so that you can mark it up, make notes, etc. However, the open source version will be continually updated and it will be great for using as a quick reference while online.

February 03, 2010 06:03 AM

February 01, 2010

Josh Juneau

The Definitive Guide to Jython Is Published

The Definitive Guide to Jython: Python for the Java Platform has been published. This is a work in which five authors: Jim Baker, Victor Ng, Leo Soto, Frank Wierzbicki, and myself, began to author early in 2009. The book covers much detail on the Jython language and it's usage. It was a much needed addition to the library of Jython books that are available today as this book focuses on Jython 2.5.1...the most current release to-date. Many methodologies that hadn't been formally documented previously, such as the object factory pattern, with-statement, django and jython, and concurrency, have been documented in detail in this text.

If you are interested in developing with Jython, I recommend you take a look at this book today. There is also an online open source version of the book that can be found at http://jythonbook.com, but all of it's contents have not yet been updated to include finalized versions of all chapters. I am working on converting the .doc formatted final versions into restructured text at this time, but it is a lengthy process.

Thanks to all of my fellow authors and to the team at Apress for all of their hard work!

February 01, 2010 11:52 AM

January 18, 2010

Leo Soto M.

Django-Jython 1.1.1 released

Sounds like we are doing one release per month! Django-Jython 1.1.1 is now available, almost exactly one month after 1.1.0. Which is something I didn't expect this time, as I've been really busy with my thesis and other stuff. Fortunately, open source software has this extraordinary property of letting a community move a project forward. Indeed, this release is mainly powered by the efforts of the community and not by the lately-mostly-absent-maintainer (that's me!).

The big new feature is JNDI support for leveraging the connection management and pooling provided by the Java application servers, making django-jython projects much more friendly to JavaEE environments. Kudos to Victor Ng for figuring out the integration and exploring the options on how to implement it.

Aside from fixing a couple of bugs, we also received a contribution by John Sonnenschein to build WAR files without bundling Django/Jython/django-jython, for those cases in which you deploy a lot of django projects on the same server and prefer to keep only one copy of the common libraries at the application server level.

More details on the changes from the 1.1.0 release can be seen on the release notes.

Finally, and in case you haven't seen it yet, I strongly recommend you to see Chris McAvoy's talk from the latest DjangoCon, titled “Django on Jython: Ready for Production”

January 18, 2010 02:42 PM

January 13, 2010

James Abley

Java Developers Guide to Objective-C on the iPhone

This will be a place-holder page containing links to the other entries that I create in this series. I've got a lot of commercial experience with Java, some Python and Ruby. This has all been server-side; I've not really touched GUIs (apart from GWT, HTML and Javascript) for a while, so this series will necessarily reflect that. Hopefully it will prove useful to others.

Topics that I hope to cover:

Objective-C the language, including comparisons with Java.
OO with Objective-C, covering how a typical Java app would use interfaces and how Objective-C might approach the problem.
Collections in Java and Objective-C.
Concurrency utils in Java and Objective-C.

January 13, 2010 10:28 AM