Follow-up to Grails, The Acegi Plugin, and HTTP Basic

In Grails, The Acegi Plugin, and HTTP Basic I blogged about some unexpected behavior in the Grails Acegi plugin (now Spring Security plugin). Good news: the behavior has been changed on trunk and is scheduled for version 0.6. Thanks for letting me know, Burt.

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Sneak Attack: Installing cx_Oracle on an Intel Mac

Install instructions that actually work for cx_Oracle on an Intel Mac. It requires MacPorts and doesn't work with the latest version (5.0.2) of cx_Oracle, so make sure you actually use 4.4.1.

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Note to Self: Rebasing from One Branch to Another in git

git rebase --onto $NEW_BASE $OLD_BASE $BRANCH_BEING_REBASED

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Review of Expert Python Programming, Part Two

Chapter 3

Subclassing Built-in Types

• I started learning Python after this was added, so it never occurred to me not to do this.

Accessing Methods from Superclasses

• Tries to explain super, but it's quite confusing (mostly due to the multiple-inheritance problems).
• The standard docs do a better job of making it clear the main benefit is making maintenance easier in single-inheritance examples.

Understanding Python's Method Resolution Order (MRO)

The section isn't as clear as it could be, but it has solid information. It explains what the MRO is used for and how it's different between 2.2 and 2.3, and the __mro__ attribute

super Pitfalls

Points out some of the most common problems with super: mixing super and classic calls (and how to use __mro__ to choose what to do) and subclass constructors that take arguments that differ from their parent classes.

Best Practices

• Solid, short (so you can remember it) section.

Descriptors and Properties

Descriptors

This section isn't overly clear. It describes what descriptors are from a technical perspective, but doesn't do a great job of explaining why you'd want to use them. Also, a fair number of the examples have errors, e.g., code for setting values when the text says it is for reading values. Luckily, it contains a link to the (more helpful) How-To Guide for Descriptors.

Properties

This section explains property and the property attributes it returns (though not necessarily why they're so useful) and does a good job of pointing out some gotchas, e.g., the way they don't pick up overridden methods. The solution offered is perfectly sensible: override the property instead of the (typically private) method bound to fget.

Slots

• Short but informative section on slots, which I haven't seen mentioned before.

Meta-Programming

The __new__ Method

This section covers __new__ and its usefulness for making sure that a class's invariants aren't violated because a subclass didn't explicitly invoke __init__.

The __metaclass__ method

This section covers customizing class creation using __metaclass__ and points out that, in most cases, there are easier-to-understand alternatives. One example of when there isn't is adjusting read-only attributes, e.g., the __doc__ attribute of the built-in metaclass type. Other suggested usages for __metaclass__ include frameworks enforcing behavior across large groups of classes and orthogonal functionality such as logging. The section closes with a link to A Primer on Python Metaclass Programming.

Summary

The summary section is a short, bulleted list highlighting the most important points made in the chapter. Again, it's short enough to be easily memorable.

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Review of Expert Python Programming, Part One

As I mentioned, I got started with the PyAtl Book Club at the May meeting. The first book I received was Expert Python Programming, by Tarek Ziadé. Part of the deal with the book club is posting a review of the book, so I will be posting about the book as I work my way through it.

Chapter 1

This is basic setup info (though the vim section has a nice selection of config settings for those new to it), so I won't really cover it; I already have multiple versions of Python running on my dev box.

Chapter 2

This chapter is entitled "Syntax Best Practices—Below the Class Level", and that's a pretty accurate description. There's a short section on List Comprehensions followed by a longer section on Iterators and Generators. This is a fast but detailed look at the subject, including the use of send and coroutines (via the mechanisms defined in PEP 342). The treatment is rather brief, so I recommend David Beazley's A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency for more detail. Up next are genexps (defined in PEP 289); these were added in Python 2.4. This section is short and to the point: use genexps wherever you would use a list comprehension unless you need some feature of lists that a generator lacks. The next section is a brief glimpse at itertools. It is hardly complete, but it does highlight one of the (IMO) most interesting pieces of the module: tee. This function makes it practical to use genexps even when you need to make multiple passes across the data. Up next is the section on decorators (defined in PEP 318), which were introduced with Python 2.4. The author addresses decorators in much more detail than the previous topics, with extended examples of using them for various things such as caching, proxies, and context providers. That last provides a nice segue into the next session, where he shows us how to replace context provider decorators by using the with statement (defined in PEP 343) introduced in Python 2.5. The author does a pretty thorough job of explaining what with is doing and how you can use it to good effect, including how to use the contextlib module (introduced at the same time as the with statement) to use context managers with code that doesn't provide them out of the box.

Thoughts

Although it was a bit whirlwind at times, the author does a good job of covering the modern language constructs that Python has picked up in the last few versions. Although you may want to read a more detailed tutorial on a given feature, this chapter does a good job of getting you up to speed with modern Python.

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Sneak Attack: Workmen, tools, etc.

Nice analysis of It's a poor workman that blames his tools.

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Note to Self: Oracle's TIMESTAMP literal syntax

TIMESTAMP'2009-01-15 00:00:00.000'

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