Playing with Python
I recently started playing with Python again. It is amazing how fast you can pick up information on how to create a service or compile Python into standalone applications for OSX or Windows.
Python also has quite a few GUI frameworks as well as a good number of python web frameworks.
After looking at portability, pre-built binaries, ease of building a program, and ease of compiling, I have settled on wxpython as a GUI framework for now, although I have used all of these except pyxul to build different applications. Either Python(x,y) or Enthought provides a pretty comprehensive Windows package including WxPython. The former also has PyQT as well.
The web framework question is a lot tougher. I have played around with Turbogears, Pylons, Django, and web.py (if that can be called a framework), but I haven’t built anything serious with any of these. I recently came across web2py. I like that it seems to give a built-in tool to add new applications. It also seems to have some of the built-in administration screens like Django. I am working on building a sample website with it now, both to teach myself and to show others a framework example. Since web2py was built with education in mind, it seems a more natural fit for this last purpose. A long time ago, I was messing around with Zope. Although Zope and Plone are pretty powerful, I dont’ think I would use them as teaching examples.
More exciting for me than playing around with Python, I have been attempting to teach it to other people. It just seems to flow naturally, both to CS students who have had experiences with other languages, and with complete newbies. I really like Dive into Python, but have been looking at other sources such as Byte of Python, a starter wiki, and Wikibooks as well.
Eventually, I hope to be able to apply some of this knowledge to Sugar which has really intrigued me. Perl had a project to recreate a lot of the Unix tools in Perl. I have a Perl OS archive saved for years now. I think a lot of these can be recreated in Python, but the idea of creating a whole interface in Python seems to be an even greater amount of work with a possibly greater payoff.