Coffeescript's destructuring assignment is cool

This article is about feature that can simplify your life while you are writing on coffeescript.

This feature saves you from writing boilerplate code for accessing objects properties.

Launching Flask on Google App Engine (GAE)

In this article i want to highlight some aspects of launching flask framework on GAE platform. I have investigated some time in this platform, and came to conclusion that flask is a good choice for building web applications on Google App Engine platform because this framework is lightweight, flexible and doesn't relate to some special kind of data storage.
So let's get started!
For the beginning you must be familiar with basics of building GAE apps. If you are not - i suggest you to pass "get started" tutorials here (for python2.7). As Google App Engine has already good support for python2.7 i decided to show example based on this version, but  it has almost no differences with 2.5 version example.
Sources are available here

url_for for Spine.js

Recently i discovered a new wonderful language  - Coffeescript. As front page of Coffeescripts website says - "it's a little language that compiles into javascript". Good it's or not, but nowdays javascript and HTML5 are the most convenient tools for implementing rich client web application. And Coffeescript makes our life much easier.

Spine.js it's a great choice if you building your client side on coffeescript. It's written in coffeescript, it's source code is easy to read and understand. And another thing that i like in Spine.js - is that it can be easily extended.

And, after playing some time with it, i found that it misses one useful feature - possibility to generate url links dynamically =(. As in some python web frameworks, like Pylons, Flask or Django, when we know the name of controller and the action - we can generate url for some handlers in templates. I have not found how i can do this in Spine.js - so i decided to implement it by myself.

Voicing messages in python, or fun with Google Translate.

This will be a quite short article, that will describe how to voice some text via using google translate. I don't know where we can use this, but i am sure that you may face situation, where this feature will be useful. Besides, as for me - it's also simple and interesting.
I decided to create python package "speak" that will give us functionality for voicing string messages. As for example i will simplify the implementation of the package, so don't judge the source code too strict.


All source code is available on bitbucket. But first i suggest you to follow this article, write some code by your self and if something is going wrong check my sources.

Flask - lightweight and awesome. Adding UI and creating first module.(part2)

Creation of the first module and basic UI for our app.

For some reasons i can not imagine how to develop some software withour two things - modular architecture and unit-tests. I like to design loosely coupled architecture, to be able to reuse parts of one app in other. This saves me a lot of time, and gives some esthetic pleasure.
So in this article i will cover:

 1. Blueprints - as a tool for separating flask app into modules.
 2. Creating "Hello-world" module.
 3. Adding some static to antigravity-app (base markup)
 4. Adding templates, connecting them to views.

If you haven't done the first part of my flask tutorials i suggest you to read my previous post and create the basic app structure for this article.


All source code is available on bitbucket.

Flask - lightweight and awesome. Get started - creating antigravity-app (part1)

Part 1. Intro,configuration of  development environment, creating backbone for flask app.

Why flask?
Actually i don't want to propagate and ensure you that flask is a good choice for building web app. Let's say - you need to try it by your self at first, and after that, you will do all conclusions.

Haven't hear anything about flask?
One of a big advantages of this framework is it's mailing list, community and good documentation. So i suggest you to find some basic information on this page and only after that return to this article.
All tutorial sources is available on bitbucket

Why do we need a strange app with a weird name "antigravity-app"?

I am going to cover a number of aspects of building flask apps in this blog. So, to prevent repeatition of creation new test app for each separate article i suggest you to follow this tutorial and create basic modular app. Lets call it antigravity-app. Every new feature that i will  be explaining later - will be just new module for our antigravity-app.