Viewing posts for the category tutorial
We're going to create a simple, locally-deployed Django 2.0 web site here. Django is a backend web application framework for Python and is deployed using WSGI - the Python Web Services Gateway Interface. The Django code is essentially the controller in an MVC-style web application in which the models and views are supplied by the developer.
We're going to roll our own HTML table generator here. Most programmers have had fun at least once in their lives manually writing HTML. Once the practice is mastered, however, it's not something they want to continue to do - they're content to let the front-end design people handle it (if even they do any of it manually these days). But sometimes that's not an option, which is why many Python web frameworks provide HTML generation for forms, tables, and other kinds of markup.
We're going to roll our own hexdump program here. A hexdump program is a useful tool for a Python programmer. It allows one to learn about UTF-8 and other Unicode character encodings, examine input and output data, troubleshoot Python source code encoding, and so on.
We're going to explain a few things about character codes and encodings here. Even though there is increasingly only Unicode and UTF-8 these days, beginning developers continue to have a hard time.
I was working with the mezzanine cms (built on django) and saw it was moving towards python3 support. Since the django and mezzanine projects prefer postgresql I decided it was time to check out the python database adapter for postgresql - psycopg - in python3.
In order to put up a python3 application on apache with mod_fastcgi I turned to the flup fastcgi-to-wsgi adapter which is also used by the django project for fastcgi deployment.
I needed to put up a python3 application on apache but had a python2/mod_python application that I couldn't touch, and since python2/mod_python and python3/mod_wsgi didn't play together (even with mod_wsgi in daemon mode), I used python3 with mod_fastcgi.
I find that most desktop users (and even some admins) don't have a firm grasp of linux time issues. It's true that in general time just works on linux, but there are times (no pun intended) when a knowledge of the key ideas comes in handy.
We're going to explain a few things about Bash redirection here. It's a perennial oldie-but-goodie topic that in my opinion is usually explained poorly.
Someone asked me the other day about how laser printers work and it started me thinking about just how far we've come from the days of traditional printing and typography. It's interesting to think about how it all evolved and where the terminology came from and I took some time to write up a piece on the fundamental ideas (in a more article-type style then my usual posts).