Monday, January 23, 2006

Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp review

If you missed the CodeCamp, don't miss the next one. It was great. I'm not even into .NET, but even the minority of the conference that was non-.NET was well worth my time. Plus, sampling a bit of the .NET take on a few topics was good for my general education.

I almost wish I were involved in .NET, purely for the sake of the Dayton .NET group, which has a vitality that you just don't see that much of in the Dayton area IT community (at least, in my tracks thereof.)

Anyway, a few things I learned...
  • There really are Python-experienced people in the area; I'd just never found them before.
  • Ruby on Rails supports Oracle. Uh-oh. It's not that I'm unwilling to learn Ruby; it sounds great, and (of course) simple to learn. It's just that I really want to use TurboGears, but it uses SQLObject, and Oracle support in SQLObject is the sword in the stone. Many have tugged, but none have completed it, and maybe I should stop waiting and just use RoR for now.
  • Speaking of Ruby, never miss seeing Jim Weirich speak. I already knew that, but maybe you didn't.
  • GCOUG really needs to work on getting more people involved. There were 15-20 people at Jimmy Brock's talk on Oracle Developer Tools for .NET - none of whom had more than the haziest awareness of GCOUG's existence.
  • Speaking of Jimmy's talk, Oracle Developer Tools has a great and handy way to bring .NET assemblies from Visual Studio all the way into Oracle, where they can be used like stored procedures.
    So, one glorious day, this year I hope, Visual Studio will support IronPython, and I'll be able to (essentially) write my Oracle stored procedures in Python instead of PL/SQL. And choirs of angels will sing.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about the Camp as I think about it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Give Django a look before abandoning Python. I believe that someone has taken a run at Oracle support, but I am not sure exactly where that stands.

Unknown said...

Don't worry - I'll abandon Python the day they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers. But I may need to give up using Python on this particular web project.

The basic Django documentation only mentions MySQL and postgres. I'd love to use postgres, but I don't have permission here. If there's Oracle support "in the works", that's right where SQLObject Oracle support is, too, and there's no knowing how long it will be there. Time doesn't allow indefinite waiting - I'm meeting the client this afternoon.

Anonymous said...

The Oracle patch is apparently in use by the author. See this:

http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/87