[Chandler-dev] EuroPython 2007 update

[Brian Kirsch]

Greetings all from Vilnius, Lithuania where it is cloudy with  
scattered showers.

Well after some transportation nightmares thanks to the wonderful  
world of airlines
including having to spend the first night of EuroPython in Copenhagen  
due to flight delays,
I finally arrived in Vilnius safe and sound.

EuroPython is definitely smaller than our American Pycon counterpart  
and the diversity
of talks is more limited.

My favorite talk so far was on Streaming with Python, Twisted, and  
GStreamer.

Yesterday I gave a lightening talk on Chandler which went very well.

I was trying to figure out how to capture all the functionality of  
Chandler in 5 minutes
or less of speech time. I decided to run our Functional Test  
Framework while
describing the different features Chandler has as the suite was  
creating new
collections, new items, stamping, configuring accounts, sending  
email, publishing
collections, and subscribing to collections. All in all I was able to  
show a large
amount of Chandler functionality this way in under 3 minutes.

I then quit the tests and switch to a running version of Chandler
spending the last two minutes demonstrating how internationalization  
and the plug-in
framework work in Chandler. Specifically, I did an Amazon search for
Scott Rosenberg and showed the collection results as well as an EVDB  
search
for Opera in San Francisco.

I got a very good reception from the audience. As many people had not
been following Chandler in a while they were surprised at how
much recent progress had been made.

This morning I gave my Internationalizing in Python: Chandler a case  
study presentation.
It went very well also. There was a very good turn out and I think  
may people were
surprised out how hard it is to actually Internationalize / localize  
an application in Python.

In addition to showing slides I gave code examples of EggTranslations,
PyICU, and how to create localization eggs using the Chandler tools.

Tomorrow the Localizing Chandler Sprint starts. I am not sure what  
type of
turnout I will get as many people are leaving today or are representing
a group hosting another sprint.

I posted flyers at each conference room and in the halls as well as
made multiple announcements in the Lightening Talk sessions
so I am hoping for the best.

I think my approach is going to be to ask developers to localize a  
smaller
portion of the Chandler.po since creating a complete Chandler
translation for a locale is a time consuming process. With the  
smaller portion
the developer can then package the .po as an egg and start Chandler
confirming that:

1. The portion that was localized correctly renders in Chander.
2. The PyICU Calendaring portions of Chandler render properly for the  
locale.
3. The WxPython provided translations for the locale render properly.


I posted a web page with photos from the conference as well as my  
slides and
the Localizing Chandler sprint flyer at:

http://people.osafoundation.org/~bkirsch/europython/

Well I am off to listen to last of the lightening talks and the  
closing announcements
for the EuroPython 2007 conference.



-Brian


Brian Kirsch
Internationalization Architect / Mail Service Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard Street 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.osafoundation.org