2008 on John Paulett

Getting RESTful with web.py

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:13:33 +0000

Django may be the Python web framework getting all the press recently, but web.py is definitely a nice, simple framework. One of the nice aspects of web.py is that it exposes methods for the basic HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and uses these methods to process each request from the client. This approach makes it amazingly easy to write a RESTful API.

web.py

import web
class Resource(object):
 def GET(self, name):
 # return the resource
 def POST(self, name):
 # update/create the resource

This approach is very similar to what Google App Engine does with its webapp.

New jsonpickle release

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:42:12 +0000

Just released 0.0.5 for jsonpickle, the Python to JSON object serializer. Check out the announcement.

Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) on Ubuntu

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:14:32 +0000

::: notice These instructions refer to outdated version of Eclipse and Ubuntu. Please refer to the new instructions on installing Eclipse Galileo (3.5) on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) :::

Eclipse Ganymede (the successor to Europa) was released today. Ubuntu seems to be stuck on Eclipse 3.2 since at least Feisty Fawn. There are nice features that we are missing out on (Mylyn, inline renames, etc.). JDK First things first, you need a JDK (Java SDK) in order to use Eclipse. I am a fan of the OpenJDK, Sun's open source version of its JDK. OpenJDK recently reached full Sun JDK compliance. But any JDK should work, assuming it is at least Java 5.

pymedia on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:34:21 +0000

Recently, I needed to use pymedia, for some audio and video encoding. The problem though, is that pymedia was nowhere to be found in the Ubuntu Hardy Heron package repository, and the only .deb installation candidate from the pymedia website was for an older version of pymedia and Python 2.4. Not wanting to run an old version and having Python 2.5 as a requirement, I needed to compile the package myself--no easy task, it turns out.

bminews.com launched

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:30:53 +0000

I am launching a social news site, bminews.com. It is a specialty site for practitioners in the fields of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics. Join in! I am looking for a site with great news on new developments, technologies, and opportunities in the field. Related topics (programming/consulting/career advice/math/scientific writing/conferences) are all encouraged.

jsonpickle

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:06:56 +0000

I have been working on an open source project, jsonpickle. The goal of the project is to be able to serialize a Python object into standard JSON notation. Python can "pickle" objects into a special binary format, but sometimes it is nice to get a human-readable format. Especially with projects like CouchDB that have use a JSON-based API. jsonpickle is on its seconds release and can now officially handle Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser. Feel free to join in by finding bugs and working on the code! It is pretty easy to use:

Building Python Packages from Source on Windows

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:28:21 +0000

I always forget how to build Python packages, such as psyco and simplejson that require C/C++ code to be compiled. The usual error I get from running "python setup.py install" is

error: Python was built with Visual Studio 2003; extensions must be
built with a compiler than can generate compatible binaries. Visual
Studio 2003 was not found on this system. If you have Cygwin
installed, you can try compiling with MingW32, by passing "-c
mingw32" to setup.py.

Now, I do not have Visual Studio 2003, but I do have mingw32. (Grab cygwin and when selecting packages, make sure than mingw-runtime and gcc are selected.) Now, back with our setup.py file, execute:

CPAN on Windows

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:56:28 +0000

To use Perl's CPANon Windows with cygwin, you need to install some additional programs in cygwin. Run cygwin's setup.exe (I like clicking the "View" button to change the listing to Full, so I get an alphabetical list of the packages). Make sure that you install the following packages:

perl (just in case you do not have it)
gzip
tar
unzip
make
lynx
wget
ncftp
gnupg

Open the Cygwin bash shell and enter: