Eric Holscher is a new(?) blogger I've been following. He's an employee over at The World Company (think LJWorld, the birthplace of django) and he's joining the few people creating screencasts in the django community. His latest project is django-testmaker and what it does is offer a productivity boost by automating test generation.
Kudos to Eric for not only posting the code for the community to use and hopeful grow, but also tackling the often under appreciated task of creating a well executed screencast.
"At work lately we've been writing a bunch of tests for all of the work we've been doing. This is generally a good thing (tm). I was getting tired of manually having to write all of the code to test the views inside of my app. So I decide to write a little app that helps me automate the writing of tests.
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If you don't know Disqus (pronounced discuss) it's a service for commenting. Sounds boring, but it's not. In fact, they kind of took the concept of comments and turned it upside down. They made their feature rich service easy to implement on any site and then made it even simpler to manage your comments - both the ones you've submitted around the web yourself, and the ones other people left on your site. Oh, and the did this all using python, django and well... a lot of client side javscript I'd have to assume.
Just recently they announced in "Testing Django Applications" that they released a patch 7936 for implementing in browser testing using Selenium.
"This is a deal breaker. It makes Selenium tests much harder to write and maintain. As anyone who’s done testing knows, the harder tests are to write and maintain, the more likely they are to be ignored... So we here at Disqus decided this would a perfect opportunity to give something back to the Django community and help out anyone else setting out to do testing similar to ours."
I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the This Week In Django (TWiD) team as Community Evangelist. What does this mean? Michael and Brian officially announced my addition on this past week's TWiD podcast. What the heck is a Community Evangelist? Well, it could mean a lot of things actually.
If you haven't heard, with this weekend's django sprint we have the merge of the much anticipate newforms-admin branch. Huge congrats goes out to Brian Rosner and the django contributors who made this happen!
Brian put together an excellent tutorial and screencast to get you started. It's a must read/watch type of thing, so what are you waiting for? Watch it now.
"I am going to go in-depth about how to perform this migration. I have done so in the screencast and will also provide a textual version here as well."
You always write tests for your code right? Well do you right tests first (TDD) or after you've "completed" your work? Both, right? Well if not, the good, disciplined programmer in you should consider trying to write tests both before and after to increase the quality of your work.
There really isn't an excuse to not write tests, but I've been there before when decisions had to be made on a project to either you write tests and write tests well, or they get dropped. Doing TDD half assed doesn't benefit anyone and mostly wastes time, from my experience. That being said, not every project requires tests - a personal project for example. Even still, when I skip writing a test something just doesn't feel right inside me. A well tested code base is a better code base. The decision to test or not test, in the end, is up to the developer. The result is for him or her to deal with.
So if you are writing test for your python apps you've probably been using either PyMock or Mock (there are others, please leave a comment if you want to suggest one). Well, just last week GOOG released their open mocking framework titled Mox. Check out the google code project page to learn more.
Update: great links found in the comments off the google blog post.
"Mox is a mock object framework for Python developed at Google (and used in hundreds of projects here) that uses the record-replay-verify paradigm you might already be familiar with from library's such as Java's EasyMock. You create a mock object based on a class, record the expected behavior by calling methods on the mock just like a regular instance, then you put the mock in replay mode and run your test. After your test is complete, you can verify that the code-under-test interacted with the mock as expected."
Michael Trier and
Brian Rosner, hosts of the most popular Django podcast on the planet,
This week in Django (TWiD), invited me to be a guest appearance on their weekly podcast. I had a blast joining those guys, and was truly honored that they asked me to join them for an hour and half worth of django, dev talk, and overall shenanigans.
"This week we have a special guest, Kevin Fricovsky, that joins us as we talk about DjangoCon, EuroPython, a few source commits, some cool projects from the community, and the Tip of the Week."
One of the reusable apps I see consistently mentioned in the djangosphere is basic-apps. The man behind the multi-app solution (blog, people, movies, books, profiles, music, places remarks, media, and inlines) is Nathan Borror, Interactive Art Director for LJWorld in Lawrence, Kansas — which just so happens to be the home where django was born. He's also responsible for the EveryBlock iconography, as well as a writing an excellent blog playgroundblues.com. We talked basic-apps, tumblog, blogging well, personal blogs, navigation, usability, minimalism, iconography, django and design, iphone, djangocon, django-nyc, python-nyc, django sprints, open sourcing your code, his flash mp3 player, and music. It's about 30 minutes long, enjoy!
When working with asp.net there's a neat little solution for taking your app "offline" or maintenance mode. It's called app_offline.htm and Scott Guthrie wrote a nice tutorial on how to implement it. But we're talking django today and now djangonauts have an open source solution of their own called django-maintenancemode. Essentially, think of it as a forced "splash" page where you can provide whatever message you want to your system users. The obligatory "we're upgrading the site" would work well here.
The developers of the open source project leveraged middleware to gracefully handle requests while still allowing "internal" users to access the admin, and any logged in user having "staff" credentials still have full access to the site. Rad! This is a nice feature to have and one I can see every django app implementing.
"Django maintenance mode is a middleware that allows you to temporary shutdown your site for non staff users and show them a page that the site is down for maintenance. Logged in users having staff credentials can still fully use the site."
All the cool kids are doing it, so why haven't you donated yet?
CoNotes wants to help you learn about startups in your area, find
jobs, see the
competition. An interesting concept here. Some people love working for startups, and others don't. This site aims to attract the previous. Those adventurous creatures who like the excitement of startup life's ups and downs. I really like that you can break the results down by city, and the
My notes community section. Cool stuff
"Search our comprehensive database of startup companies, jobs postings, exclusive content, and community of peers and mentors."
