Happy naked day.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Google just released the Google App Engine in python development environment. The environment is loaded with WSGI, and Django 0.96 “for convenience”.

Just checked the Datastore API, it is a copycat of Django reference. Google’s engineers hacked the Django’s Model to support Google’s datastore, aka BigTable. Bang! Google Account is also supported via User API, no idea whether it is integrated to Django’s authentication framework though.

I am so glad that Google has made such a move, I can bet the Django users may grow exponentially in the following couple months. Today is Django’s D-day.

As thousands start-ups running for the Web 2.0 gold rush, some vendors have setup their vending machine to sell the water. Amazon is the first and has the most comprehensive inventory, S3, SimpleDB and EC2; then followed by Microsoft’s SSDS. Now Google may sell their BigTable according the source from TechCrunch. Now the game becomes interesting. Who would be the next water vendor?

My guess is Sun. Sun ride the trend of dot com up and down. As a experience player in the grid computing, Sun has built the infrastructure for distributed computing; plus they recently acquired MySQL with $1B. It won’t be a surprise in the next morning Sun announces a new data service based upon MySQL clustering, or even the fusion of grid computing and database service.

In the last post, I was whining about the bumps in the road when trying to consume a SOAP web service using python. Thanks to Olosta’s suggestion, Suds.

The cute yellow rubber duck makes the soapy world less slippery. There is no need to generate execution code using an external tool like wsdl.exe for C#, just load the WSDL in the runtime, the ServiceProxy object would dynamically generate the function calls for you. It still in actively developed, salute to joetel.

Something needs to tailor to adapt to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server: the connection persistence. As you may know, the default authentication used in SharePoint web service is NTLM, undocumented, but well known to the public. NTLM authenticates the connection, so in current suds implementation, each method invocation incurs redundant NTLM negotiation-challenge-and-response. I would dig more for this issue; stay tuned.

Two posts (here and here) in programming.reddit.com discussed the state-of-the-art python IDEs. Two of them really arouse my interest: Komodo Edit and IronPython Studio which is honorably mentioned in the comment.

Komodo Edit is the shrunk-and-free version ActiveState’s flagship Komodo IDE. It is rooted in the same technology as Firefox, using XUL framework to render the UI, same Add-on mechanism to support 3rd-party package, and the UI is quite clean, eye-candy lacking in another term:

Furthermore, thanks to ActiveState’s generosity, there is an open source initiative openkomodo‘s Snapdragon project to build a full-fledged IDE based upon the Komodo Edit’s code base. Though I suffer the huge memory footprint of Firefox from time to time, I still believe this is a much lightweight IDE compared to the versatile Eclipse.

Another option is IronPython Studio based upon award-winning Microsoft Visual Studio technology. Whether you like it or not, we have to admit that lots of programmers would feel at home when using familiar interface. However, strictly speaking it is not a python IDE, you are locked to IronPython, and most likely you could not resist the temptation to use .Net and WPF. And at the end of day, the ultimate question may emerge: “Why not use C#? The syntax is quite similar, and we are no longer treated as second-class developers.” I doubt that Silverlight may make a difference if you are not a Web developer.

The last but not the least question when I read through all the comments. I was quite amazed to find so few comments from the die-hard old school guys. Here is one comment about using Emacs and python mode, how about Vim users? Did they just disregard this kind of flame-prone discussion or already lost the faith to convince the other world?

So if you happened to be a heavy-weight Vim user and program with python, I would appreciate if you could drop a message here to share your experience.