The Occasional Occurence

dowski.com is alive and kicking on the new server. Hopefully the wonderful world of the Domain Name System will catch up soon and the transition will be complete. More details on the server migration soon...

cw

Be prepared for some downtime at dowski.com. I am going to be switching OS, servers, networks, DNS, etc. in the next few days. Hopefully it won't be too painful :-)

cw

Tomorrow Today (Tuesday the 28th) we are having a little online get together regarding the future of CherryPy.

A brief history of the last year

A lot has happened with CherryPy and the rest of the Python web development world in the last year. Things are continuing to progress quickly. For a little perspective, here are some of the "big events" in Python web programming from the past year.

March 2005 - Twisted 2.0 May 2005 - CherryPy 2.0 released July 2005 - Django is open sourced September 2005 - Karrigell 2.1.9 released September 2005 - TurboGears is announced October 2005 - First official Paste release October 2005 - Cherrypy 2.1 released December 2005 - web.py makes a splash January 2006 - Myghty reaches 1.0 February 2006 - Pylons gains steam

Wow. I am even more impressed after researching all of that. More has happened than I remembered right off (and probably some stuff that I failed to mention).

For someone who is interested in web development with Python, looking at that list should be very encouraging. We have more viable options for creating web applications using Python than we did a year ago. WSGI is being embraced at different levels but is already beginning to bring frameworks together.

So Where Does This Leave CherryPy? CherryPy currently stands on its own as a robust, simple, doesn't-make-decisions-for-you web framework. It provides a Pythonic way to write applications that utilize HTTP. It is also a key part in the TurboGears framework (for now, at least). It is approaching a stable 2.2 release.

Where do we go from here? Ideas have been bounced around about what should/shouldn't be in the future for CherryPy. Better WSGI support. Dropping "filters". Customizable URL dispatcher.

Those are some good ideas and have potential.

I also think that we should look at the intangibles. Some of the things that I appreciate about CP and would like to see improved are that it is:

• Simple
• Self-contained
• Robust
• Flexible

Towards that, I think that some internal componentization could help with simplicity. Let's separate the app from the app server. On being self-contained, let's continue to make sure that CP only depends on the Python standard library. Let's also make sure that we provide top-notch documentation. As for being robust, how about some more performance tweaks? I think doing some or all of this will lend to CP's already great flexibility. Flexibility can also be enhanced by more thoroughly embracing WSGI so that folks who develop using CP can choose other WSGI components for various tasks if they like.

The End Just of this post. ;-) Those are some of my ideas in case I don't get to participate as much in the meeting due to my schedule.

cw

P.S. Do we have a list of core principles that can guide our development? The "intangibles" I mentioned above are important to me, but maybe there is a more complete list somewhere that I am not aware of?

I have been wanting to update the look of my series of sites for a while. The revamp has begun with my home page.

Now I just need to integrate the look into my projects site and this here blog.

*Edit* The blog is coming along...

cw

Well, the news is fairly public now. My family and I are moving from Illinois back to Ohio this summer. The gravitational pull of the grandparents on Curtis (my two year-old) alone was almost too much to resist. With the birth of Eli in December, it has become irresistable, since we want the boys to grow up knowing their grandparents.

I am now in the process of job hunting. I have been at my current job for about 5 years, so I am a little rusty when it comes to the hunt. The IT market in Ohio looks pretty good. I have an interview at a private university later this month.

I am currently targetting general IT jobs; network administration, web mastering, etc. Of course, I'd love to find a job working with Python, but those jobs are few and far between. If you are located in Ohio and are looking for a Python developer, by all means, let me know.

It would be cool to be up north and get involved with ClePy (Cleveland Python Users Group). They seem pretty active and it sounds like a good time.

Anyhow, wish me luck!

cw