Europython conference¶

I attended the 2003 europython conference in Charleroi. The exact content of the talks will probably be available in a large number of weblogs, so I'll limit myself to a few things by the sidelines. Quality

First the enormous drive to provide good quality that you heard everywhere. A good number of talks mentioned their unit tests or their test driven development. Automated tests to make sure no mistakes creep in. They also allow you to modify the software (cleaning up, generalising, etc.) without risk of upsetting things.

Someone asked a question about doing xp (extreme programming) on your own. The things that can be used best are:

• Test driven development
• XP-like planning
• Refactoring

Simpleness

Zope3 will be simpler than zope2. A cleaner design, more explicit, less implicit. Python 3.0 will be smaller than 2.x. I mean, a computer language's core that 's getting smaller instead of bigger... Normally a newer version means more features. But in this case there 's more old stuff going out then new stuff coming in.

I can't agree more!

Versatile

A nice qualification made by Thomas Reulbach was that python is versatile. You can do so much things with it. One-off scripting to complete web applications.

Archetypes

I got a very good impression from the work done for zope under the heading "archetypes". http://sf.net/projects/archetypes. For the zope programmers. Especially since you could generate most of it out of a simple UML diagram.

Cooperation

I noticed at the conference that there is a lot of cooperation in the python/zope world. There are (for some things) multiple implementations. Zope is not the only application server. DCworkflow is not the only workflow. But they're happily exchanging information. "reflab's workflow is an addition to DCworkflow". "Perhaps we can use twisted to run 'zope'".

Really nice atmosphere.

Bits and pieces

• The epoz in-browser editor uses the built-in editor of recent IEs or Mozillas. Nice.
• http://www.openarchives.org/. Need to look at this, they provide a standardised access to bibliographical data. There is a python module to access this info.
• The nicest tshirt at the conference.