Friday, December 6, 2002

xmlrpclib w/urllib2 Our product has a full featured XML-RPC API under the hood. If you ask for it, we will provide you with an open source Python based XML-RPC client package. If you ask really nice, I might even slip you the source for the Cocoa client w/iCal integration... In any case, I built the client in Python because it gives me completely transparent cross platform support (not to mention that writing code in Pythin is a boatload more pleasant than various alternatives). Problem is, the xmlrpclib module is based on the HTTP module and not the urllib or urllib2 modules. As such, the xmlrpclib module can't deal with proxy servers. So, I fixed it. Specifically, I created a Transport subclass that can be used with the xmlrpclib in a fashion that allows the developer to fully leverage the capabilities of urllib2. If you need to make XML-RPC calls through a proxy or if you need to be able to create custom ProxyHandlers to be used with urllib2, send me email and I'll pass along the source. Eventually some form of this stuff should make its way back into the Python source tree. 6:36:28 PM

IAQ: Infrequently Asked Questions Peter Norvig wrote a wonderful Python IAQ [Infrequently Asked Questions guide. Wonderful in that it is full of incredibly useful idioms for making the python programming experience more pleasant/powerful. Peter also wrote an article entitled Python for Lisp programmers. It would be interesting to see the performance metrics for Jython. 12:53:10 PM