The SoCal Piggies had their second meeting in Newport Beach on April 19th at 7:30 PM. In attendance were the same 5 Piggies who attended the fist meeting (Grig, Titus, Daniel, Malachi and Greg) and 2 guests from Caltech (Diane Trout and Stefan).

Daniel presented "Metaclasses for fun and profit", a mind-bending, head-exploding incursion into Python's "deep magic" territory. You can see his slides [http://www.highenergymagic.org/presentations/metaclasses/ here]. The most impressive part of the talk was an example of using metaclasses to drastically simplify GUI programming in wxPython. All the complexity of GUI Widget creation/management was hidden in an "interfarce" (sic) module that made heavy use of...metaclasses of course. You can see the interfarce module [http://www.highenergymagic.org/presentations/metaclasses/interfarce.py here], with a caveat from Daniel that this is experimental code and not ready for prime time.

Titus presented a tutorial on creating Web apps with [http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/ Quixote] 2.0. He started with a "Hello World"-type app and progressively added more features such as link/directory navigation. Titus also showed a more complex "mail reader"-type app with some impressive functionality, considering it only took 2 pages of Quixote code.

The next meeting will likely be held either at USC or at Caltech, since we may have more takers for those locations. Date/time TBA. Hopefully the pizza will be as good as Gina's Pizza :-)

Next topics (tentative):

SecondMeeting (last edited 2005-04-20 23:00:08 by c-24-130-23-13)