Hi ZPUGsters:

Sending this from Powells Books, the biggest bookstore in the world, and
also possibly the coolest. Had a great time at the O'Reilly Open Source
Convention, and learned a lot about new Python and other open-source
projects.

Our next meeting is next Thursday, August 5, at the usual location. We
have two particularly interesting sounding talks:

- Durus, a new object database by the ever-cool people from MEMS
Exchange (David Binger presenting)

- and for our mini-presentation, a yet-unnamed Python debugger idea from
James Rees

James and David -- if you can tell the group more about your packages,
please do so here.


I'll also be there with some swag from the OSCON conference, so don't
miss it. Full details, as always, at www.zpugdc.org.

For those of you who want to learn more about Plone, I did a 4h tutorial
at this conference on using Plone for intranets and extranets. You can
get the handouts at http://plone.org/Members/pupq/oscon.

Hope everyone is doing well, and look forward to seeing everyone!

- j.
[...]

Hi all, I have had a busy time as well, moving into a new line of
work. Risk is the spice of life, although the trick to proper
seasoning is to use it sparingly..

I would like to outline the topic and goals of the presentation I'll
be giving and appreciate your feedback if you identify any tertiary
topics that may be rewarding to investigate after reading this.

Primarily, i'll be illustrating a framework for a python program that
is supposed to transparently offer real time debugging tools to small
to medium size scripts. The goals of the immediate project are to:

   -provide debugging as transparently as possbile; in some cases no
alteration of the
      target program is required
   -provide real time information (or state) of the program to
identify the values of objects
      as they existed immediatly before an error occured (or at any point)
   -provide the ability to quickly and easily filter this information
using one of several
      methods
   -provide the ability to alter the values of any object at run-time
   -and more ambitiously, the ability to save the entire state of a
program with the goal of
    making a transparent 'fix and continue' functionality, even for
programs that crash.

My original intent was to show the power of pythons' inspect module,
which is certainly a noble goal, but upon learning more about zope and
plone, it has occured to me that the methods i am using can also be
used to show more about zope's magic. Specically,

   -show how persistance can be conceptually used, as in ZODB
   -show how interfaces can be created, so that one of many modules may assume
      a role, transparently to the calling code, at run-time (like archtypes?)
   -show how powerful searches can be constructed that can extract
information from
      python objects without having to know what object you're looking for.

This demonstration is still python-centric, but it is my hope to
muddle through important concepts that enable Z/P to function.

For those of you who are familiar with the inspect package and or
lambda function assignments, etc. if you'd like i can send the python
program to you to examine before hand. Anyone who can then imagine any
other angles that Z/P comes in play are encouraged to respond soon.

Barring that, I look forward to seeing all of you again on the 5th!

sincerely, 
James Robey,
New Carrollton, Md.

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:25:11 -0500 (CDT), Joel Burton
<joel(at)joelburton.com> wrote:[...]