Today I was interviewed by Mauro Servienti on the DotNetPodcast. The theme was my experience as an open-source maintainer on both the Python and C# stacks. We also discussed the ongoing evolution of the dotNET ecosystem, touching on a few tangent topics. The recording is in Italian and is available below here. Listen to “Python, Eve, open source e fattura elettronica. Con Nicola Iarocci” on Spreaker. ...
Flask 2.0 has just been released. Along with it come many other major satellite releases: Werkzeug 2.0, Jinja 3.0, Click 8.0, ItsDangerous 2.0, and MarkupSafe 2.0. Across all projects, Python 3.6+ is now required, and comprehensive type annotations are supported. At a glance, I’d say that the biggest news is async views in Flask 2. Work has also been done around Werkzeug Request and Response classes to allow for better sync and async in the future (it’s not a public API yet.) Jinja, Click and ItsDangerous come with a lot of new niceties. Details are available on the Pallets website. ...
It’s maintenance day in my little Python world. I just released new versions of two small but apparently quite popular packages: eve-swagger, the OpenAPI/Swager extensions for Eve-powered APIs, hits v0.1.4. It’s just a single fix for API breakage introduced with the previous release; details available here. Thanks to Asger Gitz-Johansen for the help with this release. Flask-Sentinel, an Oauth2 Provider for Flask, hits v0.0.8. This also is a small release that fixes 500 errors if you were using unpinned versions of redis. This time, my gratitude goes to Adrian Cin. ...
Pattern Matching is coming to Python, and I am not sure I like it. Don’t get me wrong, I love pattern matching. I use it all the time in F#. I am sure that once it lands in the language, it will be wildly adopted. So what’s the problem with Python’s pattern matching? The community, some core developers included, has expressed several concerns. The Python Steering Council has acknowledged them and is willing to look into improvements should they be proposed. I am not going into the details here. You can look them up yourself. Let’s just say that there are a few gotchas, like the requirement to use dotted names as constants, to prevent them from being interpreted as capture variables instead (doh!) The lack of local scope bites hard here. ...
Ever had your old, trusty Python virtual environment fail on you? I sure did. Sometimes, when I activate or switch between virtual environments, I get the following error: $ workon eve dyld: Library not loaded: @executable_path/../.Python I never really took the time to look into it. When this happens, because I am in a rush (and because I am a lazy old fart), I shrug it off, recreate the virtual environment on the spot, and get back to work. ...
Visual Studio 2017 just received an update (version 15.2). Among other nice things, this update brings full support for Python back into the official release of VS2017. As you might recall (see my old whiny post), previously Python was only available with Visual Studio 2017 Preview (a separate install). I just upgraded my copy of Visual Studio, added the Python Development Workload to it via the VS Installer, and finally (and very happily) uninstalled the whole Visual Studio Preview thingie. Alleluja! ...
Last February I published The State of Eve REST Framework. Among other things in that post, I mentioned that I was looking for ways that would allow me to allocate more time to the project (and its satellites). I really feel like I should put more effort into Eve, Cerberus and satellite projects Eve-Swagger, Flask-Sentinel, Eve.NET, etc. I love working on these projects and I know a lot of people rely on them. Also, I have big ideas that I would like to play with. At this point in time however, I cannot afford allocating more time to not-paying-the-bill activities. ...
So yesterday Visual Studio 2017 was released. Big news. Lots of cool stuff. As I write this I am watching the live stream of the 2 days-long launch event. If you want to learn about Python support in VS2017 though, you have to dig deeper and head over to the Python Engineering blog at Microsoft. As expected, the official release is actually coming out with no support for Python. It will come in a few months. Bummer. In the meanwhile however you can go and grab the (also newly released) Visual Studio Preview. This new kid on the block has the ability to be installed and used side-by-side with the official release and will be used - you guessed it - as an early preview of what’s coming next for Visual Studio. ...
So how do you install the awesome Python Development Tools on the latest Visual Studio 2017 RC? That might seem a stupid question considering that the Data Science and Python Development workload has been available with every Release Candidate so far. You simply select the workload during the installation and you’re done, right? Not quite. I found out the hard way this morning as I wanted to install VS 2017 RC3 on my development machine and, to my surprise, I could not find Python Development anywhere on the workloads window (which itself is a huge improvement over the VS 2015 install experience, by the way). Easy, I thought, they moved it to some secondary “optional workloads” tab, but a quick scan did not reveal any of that. ...
A new major release of the Eve REST API Framework is finally out with a number of cool new features (MongoDB Aggregations!), few fixes, and a couple of minor breaking changes. On the Eve blog you can find a detailed article about this important release. I am glad to report that the Eve-SQLAlchemy community extension, which allows SQL databases to serve as Eve backends, has seen a surge of activity around it. There is a new maintainer, Dominik Kellner, and a bunch of active contributors. Work is being done to align the extension with latest Eve release. If interested, please join the efforts there. Speaking of community extensions, only a few days ago Eve-Elastic version 2 has been released too. ...