Pyramid and Pylons Project Summer Sprint 2013 Wrap Up

From August 15-18, 2013, gocept invited over 30 Python programmers from around the world to gather in Halle, Germany, for a sprint on the Pylons Project and Pyramid libraries.

The Pylons Project was founded by the people behind the Pylons web framework to develop web application framework technology in Python. Rather than focusing on a single web framework, the Pylons Project will develop a collection of related technologies. The first package is the Pyramid web framework.

Pyramid is a general, open source, Python web application development framework. Its primary goal is to make it easier for a Python developer to create a wide variety of web applications.

Led by Chris McDonough (Agendaless) and Christian Theune (gocept), the sprint covered a long list of improvements, including the following:

• Merged deform_bootstrap into Deform 2, which enables developers to develop a quick and nice-looking UI with twitter bootstrap and jQuery 2 (Domen).

• Improved Colander to allow easy serialization of the data structures to JSON. This will allow the usage of Colander with other form libraries for example. Also fixed a variety of Colander bugs (Peter Lamut, Clayton Parker).

• Worked on making JavaScript form libraries more flexible to facilitate the development of more visually appealing forms (Peter Lamut, Sebastian Wehrmann).

• Enhanced the Pyramid Debug Toolbar to include internationalization, and to only pop up if there is actually an exception to avoid loading it in the page and speed up development. Additionally, much of the UI JavaScript was refactored to use Twitter Bootstrap. (Andraz Brodnik, Arndt Droullier).

• Worked on the logging infrastructure for Python-based web applications to improve the speed at which problems can be diagnosed in production (Christian Kauhaus, Wolfgang Schnerring).

• Reviewed the pyramid_ldap bug tracker to sort through change requests and eliminate invalid tickets, as well as gather additional information on real issues for further enhancements down the road (Jens Vagelpohl).

• Updated the Pyramid HTML-based documentation to let the search engines point to canonical versions of the latest technical details (Arndt Droullier).

• Triaged Deform bugs to close out invalid ones. Made many changes to the Deform widget renderers so that they can produce (fairly) valid HTML5. This improves accessibility for users with impairments and improves compatibility with other browsers (Charlie Clark, Calvin Hendryx-Parker).

• Built a library to run tests that can use Zope Test Layers using Pytest. This new integration layer allows developers working on large projects to run only one layer of tests at a time, therefore speeding up development (Thomas Lotze, Godefroid Chapelle, "Mac").

• Documented many technical aspects of the work performed at the sprint and wrote documentation for Batou, gocept's utility to manage deployments (Veit Schiele).

• Worked on a variety of Pyramid improvements (Tom Lazar, Andi Zeidler).

• Simplified the execution of Batou to a single master command, and made a formal release of the latest, more easy-to-use, version of the tool. Added much documentation to help get new developers up and running on Batou projects quickly (Christian Theune).

• Provided several bug fixes for the application development framework Substance D (Balazs Ree, Daniel Havlik).

• Made it possible to style individual Deform widgets (Martin Häcker, Robert Buchholz).

• Investigated improving resource management for Deform (Balazs Ree).

• Added an external static route feature to Pyramid for simplified integration with third party applications (Tom Lazar, Fabian Neumann).

• Fixed a variety of Pyramid bugs (Tom Lazar, Andi Zeitler, Timo Stollenwerk).

• Enhanced Waitress (Adam Grozser).

• Developed this high level post sprint report (Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker).

Overall, this sprint was a huge success and brought many highly anticipated enhancements, especially on Pylons tools. Several additional Pyramid/Pylons sprints are being scheduled, including one in Hungary at the RuPy Conference in October 2013, and at PyCon in Montreal, Canada, in 2014.