Plumbling Life's Depths

Have spent rather a lot of time trying to wrestle the deployment docs into shape for the TurboGears 2.1 release.  Even with all that work, only the "standard deployment pattern" is really in "good" shape.  Alternative servers, alternative deployment styles, etceteras are all still needing lots of love.  I am, however, I think, finished with that section for a while unless someone else chips in to help.

Also ran into one of those "argh" inducing issues this evening.  A user was trying to follow through the "Using who.ini" discussion on his way to doing OpenID with TurboGears and ran into a weird, subtle bug.  Turns out, when you disable TurboGears authentication repoze.what "fails open" as far as much TurboGears code is concerned.  The predicates just all silently start evaluating to True.  The @require() decorator thankfully does the right thing, but users who do:

tg.predicates.has_permission('manage')

Now always get a True value (the predicate object), so if you're using that to control display of information... oops.  Not likely to have bitten too many users, but it just seems we should have something raising errors on _nonzero_() if the predicate's aren't "booleanized()".

In other news, given that someone else is trying to get OpenID working, I suppose I should look at the branch of repoze.openid.  Upstream wants changes, but I haven't yet figured out what's supposed to happen wrt registration to make those changes work.  Repoze just doesn't seem to have a registration story AFAICT.

There was a request from one of the RedHat guys to add a source-code view to RunSnakeRun so that users can just flip over to see the code which is running slow when they are exploring a profile.  wx.py makes that pretty easy, so bzr head now supports it.

Want to maybe add a call-tree view.  A memory-profiling view would be nice too, but I don't have a recommended memory profiler at which to point people.  Without that it's a bit of a toss-up as to what memory-profile format to support.

Luke (of Moksha fame) has been guiding me through the "official" and correct way to do real-time web with TurboGears.  Orbited seems to be a given, but STOMP apparently doesn't scale, while AMQP isn't well supported under Javascript.  That seems to leave XMPP as the likely "official" way until AMQP is fully supported.

Of course, you need an XMPP server to do anything with XMPP, so I'm entering the maze of twisty-turny passages that is configuring EJabberD to connect to our TurboGears database for authentication.  I figure I'll wind up with an external auth script for EJabberD which uses TurboGears command-line configuration to get the DB connection and use the standard friendly-form login table for authentication.  Alternately I could go "wrong school" and just use an RPC call into a TG controller to do the auth, or maybe I could just use a "quick and light" XMPP server for the tutorial and let people struggle with EJabberD themselves (naw, that's not helpful).

However, today, before I get on the plane, I want to release PyOpenGL 3.0.1 final, so robust real-time web-apps for TurboGears are going to remain undocumented for now.

Leigh and I did our presentations this evening to a pretty-much-packed house.

Leigh managed to keep pretty-much to time... I was way over (maybe double time), but then I knew I would be, the deck was almost 70 slides and that's before feedback, discussing ChatTrack as a project, etceteras, need to get the whole deck down to maybe 10-15 minutes so we have some time to get audience feedback.  That shouldn't be a problem, this was, in essence, a first-draft deck, and it had a lot of fluff...

Need to remember to mention ChatTrack before I start talking, so that people actually get a chance to respond... just having the URL on every slide isn't enough, people think it's my company's URL.  Even with that, fact is that my presentation, even the long version, is rather fast, it seems unlikely that we'll really get all that many people chatting/voting/feeding-back during it.

Myles gave me lots of good feedback on ChatTrack, and even tested on the iPhone for me (apparently it works there now, save for some CSS issues and voting, as that's a drag-and-drop thing and that doesn't seem to work on the iPhone).  Nice guy, Myles.

No one seemed to have a better voting UI idea, but everyone seems to agree that the current UI is too non-standard for people to automatically understand.  May wind up with icky up/down arrows (as I do for the whole-post up/down votes).  All in all it seems like it's pretty much okay for now, with maybe a few tweaks before Saturday.  One must-have is the links to the "highest-rated" and "most-commented" pages, as without that you can't pull up the "summary" during the presentation to respond.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to spend with Soni and Lex for the most part (as well as getting packed and all the rest).  I'm on an early-afternoon flight to Atlanta, so hopefully I'll get to hang out with some people on Thursday night.