So, after yesterday, the conference proper started. one thing that was nice (which I didn't realize) is that basically all meals are included - I thought we would have to provide lunch somehow. Only dinner is left to us.

In any case, this morning I went to see the talk on SQLAlchemy, Jython, and Hibernate. The presenter, Frank Wierzbicki, was recently hired with Sun, so congrats to him. Still, it didn't really have all that much to do with SQLAlchemy, more with Jython, so I didn't get the bulk of it. Connecting to databases using JBDC may be interesting, but I doubt I'll be diving into the Jython world yet.

I skipped the next 2 sessions - nothing particularly interesting showing - and instead fruitlessly tried to get wireless access.

Tritium

After a shrink-wrapped lunch (almost literally) there were a bunch of great afternoon sessions in Ballroom IV. Jonathan Ellis spake about Tritium, a distributed data store written largely in Python. Looked cool, but I have little use for large amounts of data backup... I leave those problems to people like Jonathan!

Dojo & TurboGears

Kevin Dangoor had a really slick presentation showing off Comet, TurboGears and Dojo. Lots of very impressive stuff there. Even more so, a lot of it is framework-agnostic; the server side of interfacing with cometd is an HTTP request which takes JSON. Client side is actually the same as well, although typically it's hidden behind an XHR.

Of course the interesting part of that, for me, is that it should work just as well with Django.

The State of The Django

Adrian Holovaty (who I hadn't actually had a face-name association with before) discussed Django's current trunk.

New things in Trunk he covered:

They also announced a Django nonprofit organization.

I'm working on finishing my rewrite of the site so I can concentrate on Django proper when the sprints start.

Django: Under the Hood

Marty Alchin's inaugural presentation discussed Metaclasses, utility function, dispatcher. I followed along though the code; the files you'll want to look at are django/db/models/base.py for the model metaclasses, django/dispatch/dispatcher.py for a lot of the signalling stuff, and django/utils/functional.py for some neat functional utilities.

Python Code Lab

The final real event for me in the day was the Python Code Lab, one of the Open Spaces events. About 8 or 10 people eventually trickled in for it; the problems were quite interesting in their own right.

Now I should probably pay attention, so I've gotta head out.