[Chandler-dev] PyCon report

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Folks,

This weekend I was in Chicago for PyCon 2008.  It was really fun!

It was huge.  1100 people seemed a little crowded for the hotel.  For a 
day wireless didn't work at all, then it magically worked for the last 
few days.

-----------------------
Chandler Lightning Talk
-----------------------

I gave a lightning talk on Chandler at the end of the day Saturday, I'm 
afraid by that point most folks were likely fried.

http://jeffrey.skyhouseconsulting.com/pycon2008/

A few people came up to me afterwards and were interested in Chandler. 
One guy was hopeful that Chandler could import/export RDF, since he does 
a lot with RDF and he'd like to move his PIM data into that space.  I 
told him we don't, but I think it wouldn't be hard to do, since our 
import/export story is pretty stable and clear.

Another fellow was interested in something I'd describe as a round-table 
of people working on applications in the complex data space.  He has a 
small startup working on tagging and hierarchy.  How much can we agree 
on approaches to round-trip data integrity, conflict resolution, etc.? 
Are there different approaches to private data (Chandler) and public 
data (Freebase data, for instance)?

-----------
Other Talks
-----------

Twine
-----

I didn't go to the talk, but several people were curious how Chandler 
compares to Twine, it's an information organizing/sharing webapp 
(apparently written in Python).  That description is so general as to be 
useless, but apparently Chandler and Twine are connected in some folks' 
minds.

Enso
----

Humanize's Enso is a nice application for transforming text data in any 
application, written in Python, now open source (they're working on 
porting it to all platforms, right now the open source version 
apparently only works on OS X).  The Humanize team has been hired by 
Mozilla, so it's not clear to me how much more staff developer time is 
going to go into Enso, but I'd be interested in trying out Enso as an 
interesting quick-entry conduit for data into Chandler.

IronPython and Silverlight
--------------------------

IronPython (Python running on the .NET CLR) seems like it's very solid 
these days.  If I wasn't so reluctant to let myself get caught in the 
Microsoft spider web, I'd be *really* excited about Silverlight and 
IronPython.  Basically, if you're willing to require the Silverlight 
runtime (akin to the Flash runtime, except of course without the 
installed base), you can write cross-platform (including Linux) webapps 
calling seamlessly between Javascript, Python, or whatever else you want.

Mozilla and Python
------------------

Mark Hammond is apparently now contracting with Mozilla to maintain 
PyXPCOM, which makes it possible for Python apps to be written with 
cross-platfrom UI using Mozilla's layout engine, several projects 
(besides ActiveState) are apparently doing this now.  Mark said PyXPCOM 
*is* ready for use, except:

   * poor documentation
   * no pre-built binaries
   * tiny/nonexistent community in IRC/on mailing lists
   * Mozilla thinks Python community owns it, Python community thinks
     it's Mozilla's to maintain (the code lives in Mozilla's source
     control)

These seem like pretty big exceptions!  Mark was basically making a plea 
to the wider Python community to take on the support for PyXPCOM.  I 
didn't get the sense anyone was stepping up to the plate, though, so I'm 
not sure where PyXPCOM is going.

There were lots of other talks I went to, but these were the bits that 
stood out for me.  Aside from the vegetarian food being awful, it was a 
great conference.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey