CodeMash Early Bird Deadline Coming Soon

CodeMash, a developer conference for programmers of all flavors, is scheduled for January 18-19 in Sandusky, OH. And the early bird deadline is coming up soon. Register by December 18 to get the early bird conference rate of $99. After December 18, the cost goes up to $149.

At any rate, it’s a great deal. With keynotes by Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford and Scott Guthrie … and talks on Python, Java, .NET, TurboGears, and more, I’m already looking forward to it.

Get more information and register now at www.codemash.org

Conference Location

CodeMash conference

CodeMash Organizer and CodeMash Speaker Mash it Up on Dot Net Rocks

Dianne Marsh, organizing committee member of the CodeMash Conference and CodeMash speaker, and Bill Wagner, CodeMash speaker, appeared on the Internet Talk Radio Show “Dot Net Rocks” today. Bill and Dianne, cofounders of SRT Solutions, a firm that specializes in mentoring developers, talked to hosts Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell about how broadening your horizons with different technology communities will help you become a better software development professional. At the end of the show, Carl and Richard gave away 2 free tickets to the CodeMash conference.

Topics discussed:

Objectives of CodeMash conference: bring together developers of different languages and platforms to learn from one another.
Lots about Python, including IronPython
How SRT best serves its clients with its multi-platform, multi-language approach

Our radio hosts

Developer Conference for ALL developers

TurboGears

Announcing Thinking in Java OpenLevel Seminar

SRT Solutions is pleased to announce that Bruce Eckel will be coming to Ann Arbor January 22-26, 2007, to train developers in Java. This seminar will provide training in Java 5 for developers from beginning to advanced. This model will be tailored to the individual learning styles of the participants.

You'll be doing exercises from the 4th edition of Thinking in Java, in groups and within a supportive environment. You will move at the speed that is comfortable for you, learning at your optimal rate. Guidance is available if your group gets stuck.

For more information and to register for Java 5 training, go to http://mindview.net/Seminars/ThinkingInJava

Thinking in Java: An OpenLevel Seminar

CodeMash Speaker Evaluation Underway

CodeMash is a conference that will be held in Sandusky, OH January 18-19, 2007 at the Kalahari Resort. We’ve lined up some really great talks for CodeMash. Here is a small sampling:

·Dave Donaldson: Let NHibernate be Your Data Layer
·Joe Wirtley, Dan Hounshell: Real World Continuous Integration using NAnt, NUnit, NCover, FxCop, and More
·Owen Taylor: End of Tier Based Architecture
·Chris Judd: Scripting for Java
·Mary Poppendieck: Lean Software Development
·Ben Carey: Beyond TDD: Exploring the Benefits beyond Testing
·Bill Wagner: Curry Favor with Closures: An Introduction to Functional Programming

And more …

We’re going to have a birds of a feather session with technical book writers. How could we resist, with some great authors at the conference, including Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, Bill Wagner, Jason Gilmore, and more.

And … we’re also going to have a language experts panel, moderated by Bruce Eckel.

And, of course, we have 3 really cool keynotes: Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, and Scott Guthrie.

Get your reservation in early. Early bird prices ($99) end December 18.

CodeMash Conference

CodeMash … and Football!

Have I mentioned CodeMash? LOL! Even my conversations IRL these days seem to find their way to CodeMash. So no one will fall over when I mention CodeMash and football in the same blog post, right? Well, at least not my real life friends …

Yeah, we were being daring, putting together developers of all languages and platforms to learn from one another. Back when the conference planning started (ahem, discussions last spring!), we didn’t really THINK about football. But … it’s happened. One of the longest standing rivalries in college football has escalated to be The Game. Not just for the Big Ten Championship, but likely for rights to go to the National Championship. And it is coincidentally occurring on the same year that we’re putting together Michigan and Ohio programmers for CodeMash.

In this family, my 1 year old son signaled “touchdown” before he said “Mommy” (and I was OK with that). And my 3 year old daughter yells, “GO, GO, GO! RUN!”, and “NO!” at all of the appropriate times. Yup, we’re huge football fans. MICHIGAN football fans.

Sadly, even though Josh is an Ann Arborite, he isn’t really a football fan. So, on the organizing committee for CodeMash, it’s me against the Ohio guys (many of whom are in Columbus). They’ve been polite, even as they were apologetic in their hopes that Michigan would lose to Notre Dame in the early season, setting up a OSU/Notre Dame national championship. But alas, we know what happened (reminder to the Fighting Irish: it was 47-21 MEECHIGAN!). I didn’t gloat. I just quietly sat in meetings throughout the year, hoping that both teams would go UNDEFEATED into the UM/OSU matchup.

So on November 18, I’ll be cheering on Chad Henne, Mike Hart, and Steve Breaston (no trash-talking on my buddy Breaston, Kirk Herbstreit!), and all of the other guys including the AWESOME defensive line. And then the following Tuesday, I’ll go back to our weekly CodeMash organizing meeting with “the Ohio guys”.

So come one, come all to CodeMash! We’ve got Java and Python and .NET … and even some people from both Michigan and Ohio State!

Announcing CodeMash 2007

Ohio … where you need to be January 18-19

What? January in Ohio?! That’s always the first reaction. But … once I tell them what’s going on (and that it’s at an indoor water park), the tune changes to, “Really? Cool!”.

I’ve been involved with the planning of CodeMash, a 2-day conference for developers, to be held in Sandusky, Ohio January 18-19. 2007. It’s a conference for developers of all flavors: Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Perl … you name it! We’ll have some Ruby on Rails and some TurboGears, some Oracle and MySQL. The goal is to all get together and learn from one another. We all benefit from advances in other languages and platforms.

We’ve scheduled some really cool keynotes. Bruce Eckel is going to talk about issues of design in software development, from a philosophical standpoint. Neal Ford is planning a talk about the evolving programming paradigm. Scott Guthrie will also be doing a keynote.

We’re accepting abstracts right now, and conference registration will be open really soon (you can reserve a spot now, though!). The pricing is phenomenal … early bird price of $99 for the 2 day conference, if you stay at the Kalahari Resort (conference hotel, discounted room rate of $88/night). The regular price for registration (after Nov 30) is $149.

I think it’s going to be an amazing event.

Code Mash Conference Page

TurboGears Jam

I’m very excited to announce that Bruce Eckel is going to do a TurboGears Jam in Ann Arbor, Michigan from January 14-16, 2007. That’s a Sunday-Tuesday, which gives people who can’t get time off of work to learn a new technology ample opportunity to pursue it on their own. Bruce is offering pricing based on whether you attend just Sunday or Sunday through Tuesday.

My company, SRT Solutions, here in Ann Arbor, is “on the ground” to help coordinate the event, which will be held at the Ann Arbor ITZone (SPARK Central). Bruce will offer us some guidance and his never-ending Python experience and excitement. Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears) and Mark Ramm (author of the emergent Turbo Gears book: Rapid Web Applications in TurboGears) are Ann Arborites who have expressed interest in attending and participating. I sure hope that they can come!

I can’t wait! Hope to see old friends (you know who you are) and meet new friends at this event! Judging from the turnout at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting last week, where TurboGears was the topic, I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a well-attended event!

AACS Meeting Summary

October 4, 2006

Mark Ramm discussed TurboGears at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting this week. The crowd was mostly unfamiliar with TurboGears, and most were unaware that it was conjured up and written here in Ann Arbor (well, at least originally … it’s open source, so it’s now getting contributions from all over the world).

Most people know about Ruby on Rails, so he contrasted the frameworks a bit. Basically, Rails is a highly integrated, single piece of software. It uses some naming conventions, and if you follow them, things will just line up and work. But the magic can be a bit disconcerting for some. Features are either provided via Rails, or not available within the framework. That’s the beauty and cost of a single piece of software.

TurboGears doesn’t follow naming conventions. It’s a mega web framework. It combines best of breed tools in Python to support web development. This allows for components to be traded out and replaced with newer, better components, if they become available.

The heart of TurboGears centers around the following components:

SQLObject – an Object Relational Mapper

CherryPy – web server: manages request/response cycle

Kid – templating system, xml-based, guarantees well-formed output

MochiKit (pronounced Mo-chee-kit) – library for Javascript/AJAX, making it easier to write clean javascript

Templates can be made to look really simple by using and extending the master.kid file. Actually, you can have several master.kid files, and use appropriately in different parts of the application.

For deployment, the easiest path is in using CherryPy, proxying with IIS or Apache (using mod_proxy or mod_rewrite). You can also use mod_python, but Mark sees the other options as simpler.

Webfaction has good shared hosting for TurboGears apps. Currently, their control panel only creates 0.8.9 TurboGears apps, but if you ask the webfaction staff will send instructions about installing the newly released 1.0b1 for use with webfaction. They also help to support the TurboGears project.

From a commercial licensing standpoint, there are no hindrances to using TurboGears. It uses the very liberal BSD-style license, which allows you to write applications using TurboGears for commercial use.

Widgets are provided, to reduce work for the developer. Kid produces designer-friendly templates, that can be edited in programs like Dreamweaver without perturbing the python constructs (since Dreamweaver ignores them), but allowing the designer to see placeholders when testing layout without running a web server.

A question from the audience asked Mark to compare with ASP.NET. Basically, he said that you can do anything in ASP.Net that you can do in TurboGears but that you will have to write more code in ASP.NET. Maybe we will see some head-to-head comparisons at CodeMash in January.

Future Directions in TurboGears:

1.SQLAlchemy will replace SQLObject as the default object relational mapper in the future. It does everything that SQLObject does, and more. Needs a bit more work to simplify the definition to match that of SQLObject
2.Genshi will replace Kid as the default templating system. It uses pretty much the same syntax but is about 40% faster.

Documentation options:

1.Mark’s book (Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears) is going to be published in November. Half of the book is now available, on Safari Rough Cuts.
2.The latest issue of Linux Magazine has an article on TurboGears, written by Mark Ramm. It doesn’t appear that it’s available online. Here’s a summary of that article: http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2006/09/22/turbogears-in-linux-magazine/
3.TurboGears DVD contains screencasts and can be purchased on the TurboGears website.
4.Docs are available on the TurboGears website.

Examples of high traffic sites that run TurboGears:

www.diggdot.us: Combines Digg, slashdot, and de.licio.us into a unified format

www.rpath.com : Linux software appliance company

Next month at AACS: Scott Collins, from the Mozilla project, talking about the design and application of programming languages.

Python User Group Meeting Summary

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

The Ann Arbor Python User Group usually meets on the first Thursday of every month, but Titus Brown was in town this week, so the meeting was moved so that he could attend and participate. Titus talked about Twill, his testing tool. You can use twill to test web apps from the command line using python-based commands, very convenient indeed. His package descended from Cory Dodt’s PBP, and is based on the Python “mechanize” package.

Twill isn’t able to test Javascript, but Selenium does a great job of that. Scotch is a collection of WSGI modules that record wsgi transactions.

Jason Pellerin was also at the meeting, and he talked a little bit about Nose (not much, mainly just about Titus’ use of it, and the fact that Titus has extended it). Hoping he attends more frequently and does some more in-depth sessions.

The original plan, before Titus’ appearance was planned, was that Bruce Webber would talk about wxPython. Instead of rescheduling his talk, Bruce and Titus both talked. It was great. I learned a ton about wxPython, and look forward to trying out some GUI programming in Python with them.

Here is a link to resources from the talk, including both links from Titus and slides and links from Bruce. http://www.michipug.org/index.cgi/OctoberMeeting

Josh goes to Microsoft

Josh Holmes, a partner in SRT Solutions, has decided to take a position at Microsoft. He is the Architect Evangelist for the heartland region. It’s always rough to lose a business partner, but if we had to, I guess it’s not so bad to lose him to The Big Guys.

Josh isn’t leaving the area. He will be working out of the Southfield, MI office. He will remain as President of the Ann Arbor Computer Society, and a good resource in the area of .NET, Compact Framework, and C#.

Bill and I started SRT Solutions in 2000. We brought Josh on in 2004. He’s contributed a lot, and he will be missed. Fortunately, over the past several years, we have experienced a significant amount of growth both in terms of customers and consultants. We’re really pleased with the quality of the consultants that we’ve been able to find and hire. While I’m pretty excited about the opportunity that this presents for Josh, I much prefer this route.