Python News & Articles

A couple of months back, HP unveiled its new Cloud Services project, but has been a bit quiet since then. Now you can at least take a virtual tour while you wait for your beta invite to arrive.

HP has announced that its new Cloud Services project will be based on OpenStack’s open source cloud computing architecture.

Plone 4 (news, site) not only ramps up on features but also paves the way for future releases that will offer even more.

Plone 3.3 has been released. Like its predecessors 3.2 and 3.1, it represents what Plone (news, site) has called another “minor” upgrade in the 3.x series. And like its predecessors, it focuses on some simple improvements that will make life easier for users.

While there are a number of refinements with 3.3, the one that will create most interest is that a single Plone instance will be able to run any number of sub sites, each with their own look-and-feel.

These sub sites will all come with different navigation, different portlets, separate content for listing pages, separate internal search, separate workflows and permissions and separate user dashboards.

If you are just getting into the web development business and you want to build cloud-based applications, there's no better place to start than with Google. The Google App Engine (news, site) is Google's infrastructure for building and running cloud-based applications.

While there's a lot of documentation on developing using the Google App Engine on Google's website itself, there's another way to learn how to develop these applications - where you are a beginner or an expert.

O'Reilly has released the book Using Google App Engine - Start Building and Running Web Apps on Google's Infrastructure. The book is written by Charles Severance, Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and someone who has extensive experience with the development languages used to write Google Apps.

What will you learn? You will learn:

• Web programming and the move to develop cloud-based applications
• The basic technologies used to develop Google Apps including Python, HTML and CSS
• How to Use the Google App Engine Datastore
• How to Implement Caching and Use Cookies and Session
• Installing and Running the App Engine on XP, Vista, Mac and Linux
• and much more

The book is designed for beginners, but offers information that will benefit even the more experienced Google App developer.

Pick up your copy of Using Google App Engine on O'Reilly for US$ 29.99.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Some might say that over the ten years since the Plone (news, site) project was founded, the Plone community has developed an organizational fetish. However, that fetish has served them well -- leading to 2 Packt Open Source CMS Awards, participation in events like the Google Summer of Code and a worldwide Python-powered following. Here's a look at where the Plone project is today.

Python

How is Python, the object oriented scripting language known for imposing indentation on developers, the “Programming Language of the Year for 2007”?

Following shortly behind the 3.0 release candidate this past July, the Plone Foundation is excited — and relieved — to announce the general availability of Plone 3.0.

At least part of the big news with this release is the addition of versioning to the Plone core. This new capability places the Plone offering into a new class of Web Content Management competitors.