Here is another series of posts: now I’m going to write about setting up a Django production environment using nginx and Green Unicorn in a virtual environment. The subject in this first post is nginx, which is my favorite web server.

This post explains how to install nginx from sources, compiling it (on Linux). You might want to use apt, zif, yum or ports, but I prefer building from sources. So, to build from sources, make sure you have all development dependencies (C headers, including the PCRE library headers, nginx rewrite module uses it). If you want to build nginx with SSL support, keep in mind that you will need the libssl headers too. Continue Reading »

Extracted from Django docs: “memory isn’t intended for permanent data storage, so don’t rely on memory-based caching as your only data storage. Without a doubt, none of the Django caching backends should be used for permanent storage”.

Here is the lesson: don’t rely on caching. Cache doesn’t exist to make applications work, it exists to make them faster and/or more scalable. Use a cache system as permanent storage is such a bad idea, except when you’re not using it for caching (what is not the case here). Cache is a shortcut for a path that might be painful to follow, but you still should not rely on cache. You must be able to traverse the path without the cache.

Next weekend I’ll be talking about scaling Django applications at Python Brasil, the brazilian Python conference. It will be my first time at the conference, which is one of the greatest Python conferences in Latin America.

Some international dudes are also attending to the conference: Wesley Chun is going to talk about Python 3 and Google App Engine; Alan Runyan will talk about free and open source software, and Steve Holden will be talking about the issues involved in trying to build a global Python user group. Continue Reading »

Recently I found landslide, which is a Python tool for creating HTML 5 slide presentations.

It’s based in a famous slide presentation. It’s a simple script that generates HTML from a source file, which can be formatted using reStructuredText, Textile or Markdown.

Let’s make a very simple presentation as a proof of concept: we’re going to create a “Python flow control” presentation, showing some basic structures of the language: if, for and while. We need a cover, a slide for each structure (with some topics and code examples) and the last slide for questions and answers. Here is the RST code for it: Continue Reading »

We are going to start tomorrow, on FISL, another splinter sprint. “From June 29 through July 2, 2011, fisl12 will be hosted at the PUC Events Center, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil” (copied from FISL website :P). But don’t worry about the location: anyone in anywhere can join us in this sprint. There is an entry in splinter wiki about this sprint, and I’m just replicating the information here…

Continue Reading »

Capybara and Webrat are great Ruby tools for acceptance tests. A few months ago, we started a great tool for acceptance tests on Python web applications, called Splinter. There are many acceptance test tools on Python world: Selenium, Alfajor, Windmill, Mechanize, zope.testbrowser, etc. Splinter was not created to be another acceptance tool, but an abstract layer over other tools, its goal is provide a unique API that make acceptance testing easier and funnier :)

In this post, I will show some basic usage of Splinter for simple web application tests. Splinter is a tool useful on tests of any web application. You can even test a Java web application using Splinter. This post example is a “test” of a Facebook feature, just because I want to focus on how to use Splinter, not on how to write a web application. The feature to be tested is the creation of an event (the Splinter sprint), following all the flow: first the user will login on Facebook, then click on “Events” menu item, then click on “Create an Event button”, enter all event informations and click on “Create event” button. So, let’s do it… Continue Reading »