A Busy February at the Python Project!

First, let me say how pleased I am to announce that Ralph Benjamin Ruijs (ralphbenjamin) has joined the Python Project as a volunteer Engineer! Ralph currently works on the Java and Editor team at NetBeans. In his spare time, he helped to craft NetBeans Python 8.0.2 plugin for his students at the  Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where he is a lecturer.

Please give Ralph a warm welcome [great cheers]!

As a result, the conversion from GSF to CSL (Parsing & Indexing) is largely complete, and is being integrated (Julio) and tested internally (Lou, executing Python regression tests) with good results. It is ready to be backported to the development repository at Netbeans.org

My/our sole focus now is to make the NBMs (NetBeans Modules that makeup the plugin) available for our testers. I've spent a lot of time struggling with the current build system to that end. As well, we've had a number of internal discussions regarding the current source code repository and build system used for Python support. Perhaps we'll make some resolutions concerning this.

Stay tuned...

Meet the Pythonistas!

The other evening, Greg and I attended the Chicago Pythonistas Meetup Group's "Python Project Night" with forty members at Braintree's downtown facility. I spoke to the group for about ten minutes on what the NetBeans Python Project was about, and polled them on a few items. For this group:

About 90% use Python 2.7 exclusively,
About  7.5% use 2.7 and 3.x (but only 2.7 in production),
One person uses Python 3.x exclusively, on production applications.
About 85% typically do not use an IDE (they use a good editor, though), and
the remaining %15 use an IDE ocassionally for tougher projects, and
their IDE of choice is PyCharm (by JetBrains).

After pizza, Greg and I met with several users and discussed Python Web Frameworks.

The web frameworks mentioned the most were:

Django, Pyramid (Pylons project), and Tornado (one user raved about Tornado).

We also asked some users to look at part of the jpydaemon code and they explained tuple assignment to me a little better than I had previously understood. They also pointed out some potential problems with the existing code.

My thanks to Greg Winston for assisting, and especially to Chicago Pythonistas Organizer Sheila Miguez, who also referred us to ChiPy and posted a message there on our behalf!

Python Project recruits Gregory Winston!

Gregory Winston is our first team member!  I was very happy when Greg emailed me to accept the position of Analyst on the Python Project. This role is essentially like a Product Owner for a particular feature (see the list of "Features" under "Contents" at section 1.2).

He and I have worked together on projects for many years, and he is a good friend.

Greg spent thirteen years over at The Options Clearing Corporation, where he was instrumental in transitioning the OCC from the mainframe to a web environment. More recently, he has been coding in Java and other languages, building robots, and working as a "Mad Scientist". He is an Organizer at the Chicago NetBeans and Chicago JavaFX user groups. Greg is also an outstanding musician and actor.

Please give Greg a warm welcome [thunderous applause]!