Developing and deploying Shabti template-based Pylons apps into the cloud is direct, immediate and drop-dead simple with Ian Bicking's “Silver Lining”. It can create and destroy virtual servers, set up an Ubuntu server to a known configuration and deploy Python web applications to these virtual servers, all via a few simple command-line instructions.

This post is a basic primer on using Silver Lining with Pylons and Shabti to quickly and easily set up a Pylons 1.0 app on a remote virtual Ubuntu 9.10 server resident in “the cloud”.

More work on database schema development. Taking a relational model expressed in elixir and rendering it as XMI suitable for importing into ArgoUML, an entity modelling tool.

Whilst doing the background research for the previous posting on miruku I stumbled on a few other approaches that may be of use if referenced in one place.

I managed to rescue Olli Wang's “miruku” (a SQLAlchemy toolkit) from apparent oblivion and parked it in a bitbucket repos. Olli has moved away from miruku and is no longer supporting it or working on it but I still have a use for it, so I have adopted it.

Over on the sqlelixir Googlegroup, RaulG and Andrew Jones have been refining a "small script to generate pretty Graphviz graph of Entity Relationships". The dot digraph that is produced by the script can be passed to Graphviz for rendering. In this posting the script is directly transcribed into a Pylons controller action resulting in a dynamically-generated, UML-style graph view of the elixir model entities and their relations. In other words, a self-describing model.

Krishnakant enquired of pylons-discuss: "I see that there are many options for form building in pylons. Toscawidgets, formbuild, form alchemy, and webhelpers of course! I would like to know which library will help me to structure the layout of the form using python code [...] Can someone provide me with some advice on this?"

I finally found time to add my MoinMoin and PyBlosxom Pylons setups to Shabti as separate templates. Both are WSGI-callable so, apart from a small amount of copying of application support resources, having a Pylons-served MoinMoin wiki or PyBlosxom blog is now a simple matter of paster create -t shabti_moinmoin/shabti_pyblosxom MYPROJ.

Thanks to Gaël Pasgrimaud of the Formalchemy development team, Shabti now has a Formalchemy template that provides a complete example of a CRUD admin interface to the standard Shabti identity model.

I've prettified my Sprox-generated tables by turning the edit and delete links into clickable FamFamFam icons.

Connecting nosetest logging output to Apache Chainsaw visual logger

There are examples in the Python documentation but this example, gleaned from a Django support package is exactly what I need.

Twittered recently: timbl "Ouch - http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/allocation-programs&state=MA does not validate or parse in beautifulSoup or even html-tidy. Sigh." However, lxml rides to the rescue.

PyPy 1.1.0 beta has been released and can run Pylons, according to the accompanying update post

"Shabti, one of your products, has been added to Softpedia's database of software programs for Linux."

Lightly adapted from Gaël Pasgrimaud's recent posting to the PylonsHQ wiki

Beaker's new caching strategy, snaffled from Pastebin, I need somewhere to store these idiomatic sketches.

In the same vein as "Quickwiki", here is "QuickPyBlosxom", a fast track to setting up PyBloxsom, a WSGI-capable, Python-based blog which can easily and quickly be set up to run under a Pylons controller.

In querying information using a SPARQL endpoint, the GET method only supports short, simple queries. Longer, more complex queries need to use the POST method. Curl is recommended.

I have been using Pylons as a sort of sketching pad, a canvas on which I can scribble and doodle. I'm currently drafting out some ideas for linking together information about the UK Parliament, its constituencies and its Members and Lords.