Lonely Lion

I need to get up to speed on object oriented Perl, so I’ve been on the lookout for some sort of project that I could build a bunch of objects around. I had promised some relatives a lotto tracking website, but it lacks real object-meat. It’ll be more about user interface design and database interaction than OO design. Last week on the Scandinavian Cooking show, the host put on a bee suit and made some sort of berry / fresh honey smoothie. It reminded me that I’ve always thought that bee-keeping would be a fun hobby.

“A-ha!” I thought, “this would be fun to try and model.” So, I just got back from the Harold Washington Library with two bee-keeping books, A Book of Bee’s and The Beekeeper’s Handbook. I’ve started building some classes on index cards. So far I have, the world, bees, flowers, and hives. I feel like I’m writing a sixth grade science report.

As for bee-modeling, I don’t know if I’ll actually produce anything worth noting from this excercise. It’s all very fun though.

Part of the reason why I was so hopped up to get the Plone book reviews off my plate was in anticipation of this book showing up in the mail, Practical Common Lisp. I requested a review copy from the chiPy Apress user group liason (what a cool word, liason). It should be here soon. It seems like a enough conversations include, “yes, but Lisp does it this way” that I feel a need to learn the language at some level. I’m looking forward to the book arriving, I plan on writing a review much sooner than the last batch.

I finally got around to writing a review of the two Plone books I’ve been working with on this recent Plone project.

Both books are good, I felt the McKay book has an edge though. Plone is a nice system, I’m not convinced that I’ll be using it much in the future though, it’s just a bit too heavy for my taste. I could see it if I was building a content heavy portal site, but not for the typical bread and butter web app I’m usually tasked with.

However, the Archetypes system in Plone is particularly neat. If you need some convincing as to why Plone may very well be a system that you could use, I’d suggest jumping right to the Archetype’s section of whichever book you ultimately decide to mess around with (McKay devotes an entire chapter to Archetypes, FYI.)

Ian posted a WSGIKit / ZPT / SQLObject tutorial that’s really well put together. Nice work. http://wsgikit.org/docs/TodoTutorial.html I didn’t realize he’d registered wsgikit.org, double nice. I especially like the brown liquor-as-page-image. “Give me three fingers of web app bar keep, on the rocks.”