September 21st ZPugDC meeting at GWU, near Foggy Bottom Metro

Michael McLay wrote in a recent email:

I confirmed with Tony Stanco that we will have a room available at GWU on September 21st for the ZPUG meeting. The meeting room is in Tompkins Hall of Engineering on 23nd St. A campus map is also available. We can have the room every month on the third Saturday. Tony said if we only use it every other month that the PerlMongers will be using it on the alternate months. (I'm not making this up) Perhaps the move to Saturday morning will have a positive effect on the regularity of our meetings. The Tompkins Hall building is a few blocks from the Kennedy Center and from the Georgetown. If the weather cooperates this would be a great family outing opportunity.

Are there any volunteers to give a status report on the development of Zope3 or Python 2.3? If not, then perhaps a line up of mini-talks would be interesting. Please suggest a python package or module that you found particularly useful and prepare a few slides that describe it's use and benefits.

I can give a presentation on the PyGtk 2.0 GUI package. James Henstridge has done an incredible amount of work on automating the generation of C code wrappers for the Gtk+ 2.0 and Gnome libraries. The 2.0 release of this package takes avantage of the new features of the C API for Python 2.2. The Gtk wrapper written in Python is gone. The entire GUI module is written in C.

I've recently spent some time trying to use ZSI to implement SOAP, in conjunction with the PyGtk GUI interface. Unfortunately ZSI was designed with httplib, which does not share a mainloop well with the Threading module, so I tried replacing httplib in ZSI with asyncore. That was an interested several days effort. Finally I decided to make life much easy on myself so I switched to Pyro instead of SOAP. Harmony has been restored to the Universe. Picking the right tool for the job can save lots of effort.

Another topic for discussion is the upcoming Open Source for E-Government Conference. I been asked to give a presentation at the Conference. I'm interested in gathering examples of government use of Open Source software (Python in particular).

Volunteers for other subjects? And please don't be shy. about suggesting alternatives. (Chris, I hope you don't mind my jumping in with a proposal for the meeting.) I'm just trying to get the ball moving again. Hopefully some more interesting subject will be proposed and I can postpone my contribution until October.