It's All Geek to Me

Just landed in inthing is a new and quite interesting feature.

Version 0.1.4 adds a capture method which will record all standard output, i.e. anything you print to the terminal. It works as a context manager. Here's an example:

Any print statement inside the with block will be captured and posted online with the block exits.

You can also do something similar from the command line, with the inthing capture subcommand, which posts anything you pipe in to it as an event.

lets say you wanted to post the version of all you installed Python packages online. You could do something like the following:

For more information see the Inthing docs.

Inthing is still technically in beta, but these features are quite solid. Please give them a try, and let me know how it goes!

The Django code in this post comes from the official Django tutorial.

I've tried not to be disingenuous with the comparison, and I'm only going to compare like with like, so I can show code from both frameworks and let you draw your own conclusions. I'll cover the areas where they differ in another post.

Both Moya and Django use models to map databases on to familiar data structures. In the case of Moya, the mapping is done with SQLAlchemy. Django uses its own ORM.

Here's the models.py from the Django tutorial and a Moya version: continue reading…

Have you ever needed to test multiple user accounts in your web app?

If you need to check your permissions are working correctly, you might find you are constantly switching users by logging in and logging out. Or you could have an admin user signed in to Chrome, and another user signed in to Firefox. Either way, its a bit of a pain.

Here's a simpler solution; define multiple aliases to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file. That way you can have one tab open at http://adminuser:8000/ and another open at http://user1:8000/ with two entirely different user accounts.

This assumes of course that you have a development server running locally, and that your app is configured to serve to these 'domains'.

For example (append this to /etc/hosts):

One of my goals for inthing.io was to make posting events realtime, in that events appear without a page refresh, and within a fraction of a second. And that largely seems to work.

Here's a quick screencast that shows it working:

I'll post about how it works in detail at some point, but the general gist is that there is a Tornado websocket server that inthing uses to broadcast information about updates. That server may be worth open-sourcing if there is enough interest. It could be useful for other projects, and its entirely independent.

There a few options, but I'm going to suggest using the inthing Python module.

First install inthing with PIP. You'll probably know if you need to use sudo or not:

Now fire up Python, and enter the following (copy and paste each line after the >>> prompt):

So far so good. We now have a Stream object called stream, with a corresponding live page on the web. We'll have a look at that later, but lets first do something interesting with it. Enter the following function (copy and paste all the text after the >>>):

If that pasted correctly, we should have a function that generates the Mandlebrot set in ASCII. Add it to the stream with the following:

Finally, to get the URL of the stream, do this:

If you visit that URL, you should see the Mandlebrot set you just generated. continue reading…

Moya's template language is a spiritual successor to Django, and Jinja templates. It borrows a number of constructs from both, and adds a few of its own.

There is a slight difference in the syntax in that variables are substituted with ${variable} rather than {{ variable }}, but tags still use the familiar {% tag %} syntax.

Template languages are generally quite extensible, so there is probably nothing that Moya templates can do that Django / Jinja can't (via a plugin or extension), but there are a few things which are I think are more elegant in Moya's templates language (and built-in). I'm going to talk about a few of them in this post.

How often have you written code like this? continue reading…