Mailman 3 February 2007 - Python-announce-list

ANN: PLY-2.3
by David Beazley Feb. 20, 2007

Feb. 20, 2007

February 19, 2007 Announcing : PLY-2.3 (Python Lex-Yacc) http://www.dabeaz.com/ply I'm pleased to announce a new update to PLY---a 100% Python implementation of the common parsing tools lex and yacc. PLY-2.3 is a minor bug fix release, but also features improved performance. If you are new to PLY, here are a few highlights: - PLY is closely modeled after traditional lex/yacc. If you know how to use these or similar tools in other languages, you will find PLY to be comparable. - PLY provides very extensive error reporting and diagnostic information to assist in parser construction. The original implementation was developed for instructional purposes. As a result, the system tries to identify the most common types of errors made by novice users. - PLY provides full support for empty productions, error recovery, precedence rules, and ambiguous grammars. - Parsing is based on LR-parsing which is fast, memory efficient, better suited to large grammars, and which has a number of nice properties when dealing with syntax errors and other parsing problems. Currently, PLY can build its parsing tables using either SLR or LALR(1) algorithms. - PLY can be used to build parsers for large programming languages. Although it is not ultra-fast due to its Python implementation, PLY can be used to parse grammars consisting of several hundred rules (as might be found for a language like C). The lexer and LR parser are also reasonably efficient when parsing normal sized programs. More information about PLY can be obtained on the PLY webpage at: http://www.dabeaz.com/ply PLY is freely available and is licensed under the terms of the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). Cheers, David Beazley (http://www.dabeaz.com)

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Announce: Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) 0.8.0 released
by A Nagappan Feb. 19, 2007

Feb. 19, 2007

We are proud to announce the release of LDTP 0.8.0. This release features number of important breakthroughs in LDTP as well as in the field of Test Automation. This release note covers a brief introduction on LDTP followed by the list of new features and major bug fixes which makes this new version of LDTP the best of the breed. Useful references have been included at the end of this article for those who wish to hack / use LDTP. About LDTP ========== Linux Desktop Testing Project is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework (C / Python) and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the Accessibility libraries to poke through the application's user interface. The framework also has tools to record test-cases based on user events in the interface of the application which is under testing. We strive to help in building a quality desktop. Whats new in this release... ============================ + Major performance enhancement In this release major contribution from Nagappan A <anagappan(a)novell.com>. Valgrinded LDTP engine and fixed lot of memory leaks in LDTP and improved the performance. + Palm Source testing team has contributed significant amount of code in ldtprunner and also reported all major issues to make LDTP execution engine more stable. + Added LDTP repository into to OpenSuSE build system. Packages will be available for SuSE 10.0, SuSE 10.1, OpenSuSE 10.2, OpenSuSE Factory, Fedora 4, Fedora 5, Fedora 6, Mandriva just on a single click. The OpenSuSE build system really rocks ;) + Bug fixes This version includes loads of bug fixes to address important issues like memory leak, API functionality, accessibility compatible issues etc., For a detailed list please refer to release notes section of our project site hosted in http://ldtp.freedesktop.org. Thanks to all the developers for their contribution and Guofu Xu (lavi) especially. Download source tarball - http://download.freedesktop.org/ldtp/0.x/0.8.x/ldtp-0.8.0.tar.gz LDTP news ========= * LDTP packages are now built through OpenSuSE build system - http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/anagappan/ * Accessibility test suite by Rodney Dawes (dobey) - http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/ldtp/a11y-test-suite/ LDTP Recording demo =================== Record / Playback of scripts - http://people.freedesktop.org/~nagappan/ldtpguidemo.html References ========== For detailed information on LDTP framework and latest updates visit http://ldtp.freedesktop.org For information on various APIs in LDTP including those added for this release can be got from http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/user-doc/index.html To subscribe to LDTP mailing lists, visit http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki/Mailing_20list IRC Channel - #ldtp on irc.freenode.net For suggestions to improve this newsletter, please write to anagappan(a)novell.com Nagappan A <anagappan(a)novell.com> Linux Desktop Testing Project - http://ldtp.freedesktop.org http://nagappanal.blogspot.com Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready™ http://www.novell.com/linux

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ANN: java2python 0.2
by Troy Melhase Feb. 19, 2007

Feb. 19, 2007

java2python - Java to Python Source Code Translator --------------------------------------------------- java2python 0.2 Released 18 February 2007 What is java2python? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ java2python is a simple but effective tool to translate Java source code into Python source code. It's not perfect, and does not aspire to be. What's new in this release? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Small enhancement: added converstion of "public static void main" method into module "if __name__ == '__main__' block. Better classmethod support: fixed class/instance member formatting strings to account for classmethods. Slightly more pythonic: replace "x == None" expressions with "x is None" in output code, also replace "x != None" with "x is not None". Bugfix: Fixed dotted type identifiers. Better exception translation: added support for mapping java exception types to python exception types. Support for non-local base class members: added support for base class members via config modules. Bugfix: changed single % characters to %% in expression format strings. Small enhancement: added support for 'methodPreambleSorter' configuration item. With this value, config modules can specify how to sort method preambles (typically decorators). Where can I get java2python? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ java2python is available for download from Google code: http://code.google.com/p/java2python/downloads/list Project page: http://code.google.com/p/java2python/ How do I use java2python? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Like this: $ j2py -i input_file.java -o output_file.py The command has many options, and supports customization via multiple configuration modules. What are the requirements? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ java2python requires Python 2.5 or newer. Previous versions may or may not work. java2python requires ANTLR and PyANTLR to translate code, but translated code does not require ANTLR. What else? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ java2python is installed with distutils. Refer to the Python distutils documentation for more information. The digest version is: $ tar xzf java2python-0.2.tar.gz $ cd java2python-0.2 $ python setup.py install java2python is licensed under the GNU General Public License 2.0. No license is assumed of (or applied to) translated source. I'm very interested in your experience with java2python. Please drop me an note with any feedback you have. Troy Melhase mailto:troy@gci.net

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Extracurricular Activities at PyCon This Year
by Jeff Rush Feb. 18, 2007

Feb. 18, 2007

At PyCon this year we are having a significant number of activities besides the keynotes and talks. One group of those are the birds-of-a-feather gatherings being held in the evenings. The Python community consists of a number of smaller communities and we're encouraging them to hold meetings, dinners and other activities at PyCon this year. The organizers have tried to leave room in the busy schedule for these to happen and of course for some non-Python social BoFs as well. Here are the BoFs with which you have the opportunity to get involved: * Python in Education * Python in Science * Healthcare and Python * A Content Repository Standard for Python * Jython Development * Django * Pylons Web Framework * Trac Users and Developers * Keysigning Party * Tech that Runs the Python Conference * Users of Bazaar Version Control/Launchpad * Buildbot Users and Developers * Python Advocacy Community Forum * Texas Regional Unconference Dinner Meet * PyGame Programming/Playing Clinic * Board Game Socials * Bowling * Climbers You can check them out at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/BoF The room/offsite schedule is listed at the bottom of that page but many of the groups have not yet declared when and where they are meeting. Nudges are welcome. The other set of activities at PyCon are the 4-days of code sprints held at the end of the conference. A sprint is a focused development session, in which developers gather in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers will sometimes work in pairs using the Extreme Programming (XP) pair programming approach. The sprints that have announced so far are: * Work towards Zope 3.4 release * Fun Educational Software for "Playful Learning" * PyCon-Tech: Improve the convention software * Zope 3 Learner's Circle * Python Job Board * Django * Trac * Jython * Docutils: squash bugs & add features * TurboGears * Write a Game * Create a Win32 version of MySQLdb under Python 2.5 * SchoolTool & CanDo Sprint coaches should plan for an introductory session on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, to help attendees get started. This might involve helping them to get SVN or CVS installed and checking out the development tree, talking about the software's architecture, or planning what the four-day sprint will try to accomplish. You can read more at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/Sprinting and even add your name to particular sprint wiki pages, to encourage them to happen. See you later this week. Get plenty of sleep beforehand, you won't get much at PyCon this year! Jeff Rush PyCon Co-Chair

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Game Programming Clinic and Online Gaming at PyCon
by Jeff Rush Feb. 18, 2007

Feb. 18, 2007

At PyCon this year we're going to have a multi-day game programming clinic and challenge. This is a first-time event and an experiment to find those in the Python community who enjoy playing and creating games. Python has several powerful modules for the creation of games among which are PyGame and PyOpenGL. On Friday evening, Phil Hassey will give an introduction to his game Galcon, an awesome high-paced multi-player galactic action-strategy game. You send swarms of ships from planet to planet to take over the galaxy. Phil will be handing out free limited-time licenses to those present. He will also be glad to talk about the development of Galcon using PyGame. After the Friday PSF Members meeting lets out around 8:40pm, Richard Jones will give his 30-60 minute introduction to the PyGame framework so you too can get started writing games. On Saturday evening, Lucio Torre and Alejandro J. Cura, who have come from Argentina to give the talk "pyweek: making games in 7 days" Friday afternoon, will help people develop their games in the clinic room with mini-talks on various game technologies. On Sunday evening Lucio and Alejandro will be around to help with further development issues, and Richard Jones will be back to present more about PyGame and help reach a group concensus on what to work on during the GameSprint. Richard also runs PyWeek, a bi-annual python game programming challenge online. Phil will also be back helping people get into playing Galcon and everyone can get into multiplayer challenges against those who show up. And then during the four days of sprinting, the group will compete to produce a working game meeting agreed upon requirements and then decide who has best achieved those. This overall gaming track is informal, with people coming and going, and others are welcome to get involved in giving mini-talks or showing off their creations. Specific rooms and times can be found on the birds-of-a-feature wiki page at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/BoF The wiki page for collecting game clinic ideas is at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/GamingClinic And the wiki page for the game sprint is at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/GameSprint --- Want to get a head start? Follow the online lectures about PyGame at: http://rene.f0o.com/mywiki/PythonGameProgramming And to get your laptop ready, check out the installation and testing instructions about half way down the page at: http://rene.f0o.com/mywiki/LectureOne#line-50 You can also check out the game Galcon at: http://www.imitationpickles.org/galcon/index.html See you later this week, Jeff Rush Co-Chair PyCon 2007

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PyPy 0.99 released
by Carl Friedrich Bolz Feb. 17, 2007

Feb. 17, 2007

====================================================================== pypy-0.99.0: new object spaces, optimizations, configuration ... ====================================================================== Welcome to the PyPy 0.99.0 release - a major snapshot and milestone of the last 8 months of work and contributions since PyPy-0.9.0 came out in June 2006! Main entry point for getting-started/download and documentation: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index.html Further below you'll find some notes about PyPy, the 0.99.0 highlights and our aims for PyPy 1.0. have fun, the PyPy team, Samuele Pedroni, Carl Friedrich Bolz, Armin Rigo, Michael Hudson, Maciej Fijalkowski, Anders Chrigstroem, Holger Krekel, Guido Wesdorp and many others: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/contributor.html What is PyPy? ================================ Technically, PyPy is both a Python Interpreter implementation and an advanced Compiler, actually a framework for implementing dynamic languages and generating virtual machines for them. The Framework allows for alternative frontends and for alternative backends, currently C, LLVM and .NET. For our main target "C", we can can "mix in" different Garbage Collectors and threading models, including micro-threads aka "Stackless". The inherent complexity that arises from this ambitious approach is mostly kept away from the Python interpreter implementation, our main frontend. Socially, PyPy is a collaborative effort of many individuals working together in a distributed and sprint-driven way since 2003. PyPy would not have gotten as far without the coding, feedback and general support from numerous people. Formally, many of the current developers are involved in executing an EU contract with the goal of exploring and researching new approaches to Language/Compiler development and software engineering. This contract's duration is about to end March 2007 and we are working and preparing the according final review which is scheduled for May 2007. Key 0.99.0 Features ===================== * new object spaces: - Tainting: a 270-line proxy object space tracking and boxing sensitive information within an application. A tainted object is completely barred from crossing an I/O barrier, such as writing to files, databases or sockets. This allows to significantly reduce the effort of e.g. security reviews to the few places where objects are "declassified" in order to send information across I/O barriers. - Transparent proxies: allow to customize both application and builtin objects from application level code. Works as an addition to the Standard Object Space (and is translatable). For details see http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/proxy.html * optimizations: - Experimental new optimized implementations for various built in Python types (strings, dicts, lists) - Optimized builtin lookups to not require any dictionary lookups if the builtin is not shadowed by a name in the global dictionary. - Improved inlining (now also working for higher level backends) and malloc removal. - twice the speed of the 0.9 release, overall 2-3 slower than CPython * High level backends: - It is now possible to translate the PyPy interpreter to run on the .NET platform, which gives a very compliant (but somewhat slow) Python interpreter. - the JavaScript backend has evolved to a point where it can be used to write AJAX web applications with it. This is still an experimental technique, though. For demo applications see: http://play1.codespeak.net:8008/ * new configuration system: There is a new comprehensive configuration system that allows fine-grained configuration of the PyPy standard interpreter and the translation process. * new and improved modules: Since the last release, the signal, mmap, bz2 and fcntl standard library modules have been implemented for PyPy. The socket, _sre and os modules have been greatly improved. In addition we added a the pypymagic module that contains PyPy-specific functionality. * improved file implementation: Our file implementation was ported to RPython and is therefore faster (and not based on libc). * The stability of stackless features was greatly improved. For more details see: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/stackless.html * RPython library: The release contains our emerging RPython library that tries to make programming in RPython more pleasant. It contains an experimental parser generator framework. For more details see: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/rlib.html * improved documentation: - extended documentation about stackless features: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/stackless.html - PyPy video documentation: eight hours of talks, interviews and features: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/video-index.html - technical reports about various aspects of PyPy: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index-report.html The entry point to all our documentation is: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index.html What about 1.0? ====================== In the last week leading up to the release, we decided to go for tagging the release as 0.99.0, mainly because we have some efforts pending to integrate and complete research and coding work: * the JIT Compiler Generator is ready, but not fully integrated with the PyPy interpreter. As a result, the JIT does not give actual speed improvements yet, so we chose to leave it out of the 0.99 release: the result doesn't meet yet the speed expectations that we set for ourselves - and which some blogs and people have chosen as the main criterium for looking at PyPy. * the extension enabling runtime changes of the Python grammar is not yet integrated. This will be used to provide Aspect-Oriented Programming extensions and Design by Contract facilities in PyPy. * the Logic object space, which provides Logic Variables in PyPy, needs to undergo a bit more testing. A constraint problem solver extension module is ready, and needs to be integrated with the codebase. PyPy 0.99 is the start for getting to 1.0 end of March 2007, which we intend to become a base for a longer (and more relaxed :) time to come. Funding partners and organisations ===================================================== PyPy development and activities happen as an open source project and with the support of a consortium partially funded by a 28 months European Union IST research grant. The full partners of that consortium are: Heinrich-Heine University (Germany), Open End (Sweden) merlinux GmbH (Germany), tismerysoft GmbH (Germany) Logilab Paris (France), DFKI GmbH (Germany) ChangeMaker (Sweden), Impara (Germany)

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Front Range Pythoneers Monthly Meeting: Wed, Feb 21, in Boulder, Colorado
by frpythoneers＠gmail.com Feb. 16, 2007

Feb. 16, 2007

== Meeting: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 == * Time: 6-8 PM * Location: bivio Software, Inc., 28th and Iris. Above Hair Elite in Suite S. There is abundant parking. We have a line up of PyCon talks. Our presenters will have a chance to practice on you, while giving you a sneak peek of what will happen in Dallas next weekend: * Fernando Perez will present his joint talk with Brian Granger, "IPython: Getting the most out of working interactively in Python": IPython (if you do not know it yet) is an enhanced interactive shell for Python. It provides a large number of features not found in the default shell that make interactive work in Python more seamless and convenient. * Jim Baker will present "Iterators in Action": Using iterators well can make your code lean and your programming fun. We will distill current best practice by investigating some (mostly) useful examples of iterators in action. Expect to see a focus on itertools and recipes from the cookbook. Other items to talk about: * BoulderSprint. We had a great JythonSprint, focusing on getting IPython to work on it. Next sprint will be in April, also on IPython. Wait a second, what's up with IPython? * Google Summer of Code. One of our missions is to mentor Pythoneers. Does it make sense to add a local component to GSoC 2007? We will have food & drink available as usual. Hope to see you there! More info: http://wiki.python.org/moin/FrontRangePythoneers

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ANNOUNCE: Elisa 0.1.4
by Philippe Normand Feb. 16, 2007

Feb. 16, 2007

The Elisa team is proud to announce 0.1.4 release of the core of the Elisa home multimedia system. Elisa is a project to create an open source cross platform media center solution. While our primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems we also currently support Microsoft Windows and also hope to support MacOSX in the future. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework and is developped in Python. We fixed many issues, bugs and added some features since the last release: - the media database system has been improved, one step further towards big media collections support - pictures/movies thumbnails are now compatible with Freedesktop specifications - the skin has been slightly improved in many places (new pictos, better animations, picture-folders icon compositing) - Pigment labels now display much better and are now scalable - The SDL Pigment backend has been replaced by a XWindow/GLX backend - Pigment now handle screens with non-square aspect ratio resolutions

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ANN: The Technology Behind PyCon - 1 ShowMeDo Video, the first in a new series
by Ian Ozsvald Feb. 15, 2007

Feb. 15, 2007

Summary: Doug Napoleone introduces the technology behind PyCon-Tech in this introductory video, the first in a larger series. This series will cover Zope, Django, PHP and other tools. PyCon-Tech Introduction "PyCon-Tech is an initiative started by A. M. Kuchling to create an integrated set of tools for running the PyCon conference. In this introduction we give an overview of the PyCon web site public interfaces (wiki, talk archive, schedule) and the technologies used to implement them (pmwiki, zope, django). The technologies are fully integrated into a (mostly) seamless site." http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=pythonNapleonePyConTech1&fromSeriesID… About Doug Napoleone: This is Doug's first ShowMeDo series. He will guide you through the technology used behind-the-scenes at PyCon. Remember to say Thanks and leave feedback if you like Doug's work. About ShowMeDo.com: Free videos (we call them ShowMeDos) showing you how to do things. The videos are made by us and our users, for everyone. 74 of our 148 videos are for Python, with more to come. We'd love to have more contributions - would you share what you know? The founders, Ian Ozsvald, Kyran Dale http://ShowMeDo.com

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ANN: Einführung in die Programmierung mit Python part 7 - Funktionen (1 German ShowMeDo video)
by Ian Ozsvald Feb. 15, 2007

Feb. 15, 2007

Summary: Lucas Holland and Marius Meinert continue their introductory German Python series, in this instalment they have released their 7th video. German video description: Funktionen “In dieser Episode geht es um Funktionen, also um das Gruppieren von Code zu Einheiten, die wiederverwendbar sind.” http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=pythonHollandIntroToPython7_german&fr… About Lucas Holland and Marius Meinert: This is Lucas and Marius' first ShowMeDo series and the have made our first non-English series. If you like their videos, please leave some words of encouragement and thanks for their efforts. About ShowMeDo.com: Free videos (we call them ShowMeDos) showing you how to do things. The videos are made by us and our users, for everyone. 74 of our 148 videos are for Python, with more to come. We'd love to have more contributions - would you share what you know? The founders, Ian Ozsvald, Kyran Dale http://ShowMeDo.com

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