[Baypiggies] Overview of 9/13 SnapLogic talk

[Charles Merriam]

Those who like their overviews more linky may wish to read
http://www.charlesmerriam.com/blog/?p=66


On 9/14/07, Charles Merriam <charles.merriam at gmail.com> wrote:
> BayPiggies Overview of September 13, 2007
>
> Mike Pittaro, a founder at SnapLogic, spoke on "An Open Source Data
> Integration Project using Python".  Slides are available as a PDF
> (http://tinyurl.com/2ophj7). Mike spoke primarily about the issues
> building the team, infrastructure, and installer for a large Python
> project.
>
> The SnapLogic product is a data munging and translation application
> aimed at developers.  Under a GPL license, professional support and
> service is available for a fee.  It has taken about one year to
> develop.  Hiring Python developers was difficult, and eventually good
> programmers were hired that then learned Python.   They are still
> hiring.
>
> The development infrastructure came together quickly using primarily
> open source tools written in Python: mailman, subversion, trac, and
> moinmoin.  The team uses both Linux and Windows (using Samba
> partitions) and both Eclipse/Pydev and vi/emacs.  The build process
> uses buildbot to kick of builds, epydoc and epytext for documentation,
> figleaf for code coverage, unittest for testing, and (closed source)
> bitrock for installation.  This led to a 11.5 Joel Score
> (http://tinyurl.com/1s8w).
>
> They learned some rules about coding standards, keeping control of
> import statements, and wrapping really complex libraries with
> getattr() tricks.  Mostly, they fought with the installation problems
> of installation of an open source project that requires Python, C,
> databases, lots of interactions, and also needs to deploy on Windows.
> They are still fighting with parallelization.
>
> Mike suggested several sources of information.  First, keep reading
> the library reference over and over.  He also recommended Python Is
> Not Java (http://tinyurl.com/2qyn82) and Code Like a Pythonista
> (http://tinyurl.com/2cv9kg).
>
> Thanks again to Mike for a great talk!
>