In the afternoon of the 2nd official day of PyCon 2009, I started off the talks with Ed Leafe’s Dabo talk on web applications using Dabo. He used a product that they have created called Springboard that kind of does a Google Gears type of interaction with the web. It gives you a client that can interface with a database on a remote server where you can edit data and which can pick up new data from the server. Of the talks that I went to, it was the best. The 2nd best for me was probably Christopher Barker’s talk right before lunch. I would recommend giving Dabo and Springboard a try. Even if you can’t use it directly, you can probably learn a lot from the source.
The 2nd talk I went to was Manfred Schwendinger’s Google App Engine which I found pretty boring. He had some good statistics on how much processing power you get and whatnot, but that was about all I got from it. Part of the problem was likely due to the fact that he wasn’t a native English speaker, so he wasn’t always easy to understand.
The last talk I went to was Bill Gribble’s Precise state recovery and restart for data-analysis applications. I didn’t get much out of this one either for much the same reasons as the previous talk. I’m sure the fault lies entirely with me. Maybe my attention span is shortening or something. I’m pretty sure I never did here exactly how to restore state…at least, not in a general way.
I skipped the other talks so I could go to Steve Holden’s Teach Me Web Testing open space, which I’ll write a separate post on. I had wanted to see Ian Bicking’s talk, but alas. There are too many interesting sounding things going on at the same time and you just have to make sacrifices. Stay tuned!
