JythonMonthly/Newsletters/May2009

Jython Monthly
May 2009 -- Issue #30

The podcast is also available at the podcast site: http://www.jythonpodcast.com

I hope that you enjoy this month's issue, and please feel free to send me suggestions, questions, or feedback.

Thanks

My information is as follows:

Josh Juneau

Podcast Website: http://www.jythonpodcast.com
jythonpodcast@gmail.com
Podcast Feed: http://jythonpodcast.hostjava.net/podcasts/podcasts.xml

News

Jython 2.5rc3 Released

This is the third release candidate of the 2.5 version of Jython. It fixes some threading issues and partially fixes JLine on Cygwin.

Go to http://www.jython.org to download and test!

JavaOne 2009 Conference

The JavaOne conference will be held June 2nd through 5th at the Moscone center in San Francisco, CA. You can register online now.

Highlights for Jython include:

BoF entitled 'Language Interoperability on the JVM Made Simple' - Tobias Ivarsson
Tech Session entitled 'Exploiting Concurrency with Dynamic Languages' - Tobias Ivarsson
Panel entitled 'Script Bowl 2009: A Scripting Languages Shootout' - Roberto Chinnici, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Thomas Enebo, Sun Microsystems, Inc. ; Rich Hickey, Clojure; Guillaume Laforge, SpringSource; Martin Odersky, EPFL; Raghavan Srinivas, Self; Frank Wierzbicki, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Tech Session entitled 'Toward a Renaissance VM' - Brian Goetz, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; John Rose, Sun Microsystems
Tech Session entitled 'Dynamic Languages Powered by Glassfish AS V3' - Jacob Kessler, Sun Microsystems; Vivek Pandey, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Tech Session entitled 'Alternative Languages on the JVM Machine' - Cliff Click, Azul Systems

EuroPython 2009 Conference

EuroPython, Europe's Premier Python Conference, will take place from 28th June to 4th July 2009 in Birmingham, UK. For more details, please visit the website at www.europython.eu

Talks Related to Jython include:

Mixing Python and Java - Andreas Schreiber

Java is being used for many existing applications in a variety of domains. Sometimes it is useful to integrate them with Python. For instance, one may wish to add embedded Python scripting to Java applications, to communicate with separate Python code written for CPython, or use existing Java libraries from Python code.

The talk gives an overview of the various techniques, tools, and libraries for bridging Python and Java. In particular, the following implementations are described and compared:

Embedding of Python into Java with Jython.
Calling Java code from CPython scripts with JPype.
Calling CPython from Java code with JEPP.
Using inter process communication between Python and Java (e.g., with CORBA or SPIRO).

Examples for all techniques are demonstrated, and use cases for the different approaches are presented with examples from real world applications.

IronClad: Hubris and Laziness - William Reade

The lack of support for compiled CPython extensions is a serious problem for alternative implementations of Python. Ironclad is, so far as I know, the only major attempt to rectify this situation: it's a module for IronPython on Windows that enables binary compatibility with extensions compiled for CPython 2.5. These include large parts of the NumPy and SciPy packages, in addition to simpler modules like bz2, _hashlib, and _elementtree.

I plan to discuss what I have done to get this far, what strategies succeeded and failed, and what I've learned that may be valuable in implementing similar functionality for PyPy and/or Jython.

This talk is primarily concerned with the details of hooking up parts of two separate Python implementations -- CPython and IronPython -- such that objects from either one can be freely used by the other without anyone needing to recompile anything. Most of the discussion will be at a relatively high level, but pitched towards those with some interest in the details of different Python implementations.

A Better Python for the JVM - Tobias Ivarsson

For future versions of Jython we are working on an optimizing compiler that applies many traditional compiler features to the dynamic nature of Python. The aim of the project is to replace the current compiler in a version after Jython 2.5.

In this presentation I will talk about the optimizations performed by this compiler, both static optimizations as well as optimistic optimizations with fallback capabilities. I will also share a comparative overview of the performance of Jython with the new compiler compared to the old compiler and CPython.

This will be a fairly advanced talk about the prototype for an optimizing compiler for Jython. I will present the general structure of this compiler, the optimizations it performs and the performance improvements it gives.

Acceptance Testing with RobotFramework - Pekka Kaiarck

Acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) using a Python based test automation framework. This is an introduction build around demonstrations and requires no earlier experience. Robot Framework (http://robotframework.org) is a generic open source test automation framework for acceptance testing and ATDD. It used the keyword-driven test automation approach and has an easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented with Python or Java (through Jython).

Web Frameworks and Jython - Frank Wierzbicki

A final release of Jython 2.5 should be out by the time of this presentation. The Jython project has been collaborating with a number of web frameworks to make sure that they work well on the Jython platform. At the time that this abstract was written, Django and Pylons are working well on Jython, and there has been good progress on getting TurboGears to run. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to take advantage of Java-based technologies from these web frameworks, including the use of Java libraries and deployment options. Some knowledge of Python web frameworks is assumed, but no knowledge of Java is required.

The Definitive Guide To Jython (with Django) to be Published by Apress

Look for The Definitive Guide to Jython (with Django) to be published by Apress later this year. The book will include beginner to advanced materials covering the Jython language in entirety. Authors include Jim Baker, Frank Wierzbicki, Leo Soto, Victor Ng, and Josh Juneau.

Check it out on the Apress site: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430225270 and stay tuned for more information the open source JythonBook project as well!

PyCon 2009 - Jython Video and Slides

Panel VMS - http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/21/

A Better Python for the JVM - Tobias Ivarsson http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/32/

Jython Progress - Frank Wierzbicki http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/46/

Pylons on Jython - Philip Jenvey http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/50/

Django on Jython 101 - Leo and Jim http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/54/

Articles

IronPython, Jython, Scala and Python: A Fairly Meaningless Server Performance Comparison

Written By: James Gardner

IronPython 2.0 is a full implementation of Python 2.5 targetting the .NET platform and yet it can be very hard to find good instructions on how to set it up because not all distributions of Mono include IronPython 2 and those that do might not include the Python standard library so I thought I'd put some instructions up on how to do it.

Once it was running I thought it would be interesting to benchmark a simple WSGI Hello World! server to see if it is faster than ordinary Python. That got me wondering about Jython which in turn got me wondering about Scala. The upshot is that I have instructions for installing all 3 and running a simple benchmark on each, along with a pure-Python version for reference. Before long I was experimenting with Java Servlets on Tomcat too!

Read Article