Pythonic Heros

Python at the moment has some huge momentum going in integration.

There are some key heros doing the work on this. Typically these heros are busy contributing to a wide variety of separate projects as well as creating other projects that pull things together or provide missing functionality that can be used in many other projects.

I guess the breed is typified by Ian Bicking. You can see from his latest post Releases Releases Releases how he is working on a number of projects that are getting picked up all over the place by meta projects. SQLObject for example is now being used by many projects including the latest and hottest thing Turbogears.

It is interesting that Ian has succeeded in getting so many people to contribute to SQLObject and for it to be included in so many different projects. There have been many different database layers before SQLObject, it might have seemed odd to create another. Yet the community around SQLObject seems to be more active, more open and more successful than any of the others.

Of course that is not enough. Ian is also very busy with PythonPaste, I think this has the potential to make the WSGI spec (by another Pythonic hero Phillip J. Eby - for WSGI as well as all the cool stuff for packaging and installing python stuff [python eggs]) really fly. The way this allows applications written using many different frameworks to run within many different WSGI servers is what is going to really change the python hosting experience. When we get to the point where python hosting is provided via PythonPaste then python has all it needs to take its place on the big stage.

There is still more. Ian is also the creator of FormEncode again used by many projects. He also contributes to Py.test, Kid, Pudge and many others. Which reminds me of another hero at the moment Ryan Tomayko of Lesscode again tools that work in small ways but can be recombined in powerful ways.

We can see all this coming together with a project like Turbogears (and somewhat similarly with Subway) which seem to me to be a more helpful community response than the do it all again approach of Django (powerful though it is).

Obviously much recent activity is inspired by RubyonRails, however, the integrational approach demonstrated by Ian, Philip, Kevin and others in the Python community is the one which I believe is the most revolutionary and inspiring.

So my thanks to all these wonderful gurus (and apologies to all those whose names I have not mentioned - I have run out of time as I am taking a funeral very shortly).

It was interesting to see how the characteristics of this wave of python work contrast with The top 10 things that aren't Web 2.0 - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals), it seems to me that all this stuff clearly demonstrates that the Python world really groks what the new web world is all about.

Comments

[Ian Bicking]

Aw shucks

[Kevin Dangoor]

Hey, thanks for the positive encouragement!

Python has a great wealth of people that are helping out, and I know that I would have gotten far less done this year if it weren't for folks like Ian, Oleg Broytmann, Phillip, Ryan, Bob Ippolito, the CherryPy folks and even the helpful people in Twistedland (which I'm no longer using).

Also, to the credit of the Django project: they had started developing their tools before much of the TurboGears parts had matured to where they are today. Though it might look like they reinvented a lot of things from other projects, I have a great respect for the fact that they went to the trouble to put together a high-quality open source release. In doing so, they're sharing ideas and code that the rest of us can make use of in one way or another. (I"ve got my eyes on their caching system, for example :)

Thanks again for writing this piece. Ian, Ryan and Phillip are all well-deserving of this kind of recognition for doing so much excellent work and giving it freely to the rest of us to use and build on!

[Peter Damoc]

My personal favourite Pythonic hero remains Robin Dunn. Maybe he doen't have all that many projects he contributes in BUT the work he did on wxPython is great.