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For a web application that I am developing as part of a research project I have decided on using Python for the business logic. The reasons being that the application will use fixed-point binary arithmetic, units, and data output as line-graphs. Python seems to have the libraries that I’ll need for this and is better suited for rapid development than Java.

Part of the requirements that I have been researching this last week have been concerned with the identification of a suitable web application framework for Python. I started out this week assuming that this would be Django and even bought the book! However, because this is research, I have the luxury of time so I’ve done some additional research and decided that the alternative frameworks TurboGears and Pylons were also worth a look. Searching Google for getting started screencasts and videos I discovered a wonderful video of a web application framework comparison presentation by Sean Kelly. In this presentation, Sean uses J2EE (Servlets and JSPs), Rails, DJango, TurboGears, Zope/Plone and even Enterprise Java Beans (JBoss) to develop a simple time-tracker application and reports his experiences. Rails, Django and TurboGears come out (roughly in that order), but the big surprise is that Zope/Plone comes out top! So, maybe I need to rethink!

I’ve embedded the video here as it’s not only a useful and timely comparison of web application frameworks, it’s also an example of just how useful and inspirational a simple presentation can be!

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=6297126166376226181&hl=en-GB

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Comments:¶

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Paulo Simões - Sep 3, 2010

Some months ago a I've tried to do something on Pipes. I bit tricky but really usefull to build PLE connections... Paulo

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Paulo, for very simple use-cases, for example aggregating some RSS feeds, doing some filtering, removing duplicates, pipes is very simple. For more complex manipulations, I think you do need more expertise and some programming experience. I'm very much a beginner! As I mentioned in my post, Tony Hirst (@psychemedia on twitter) is my mentor in this!

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psychemedia - Sep 4, 2010

Have OPML, will travel...Here's a recipe from @cogdog about how to Downe's OPML file and generate a custom search engine that will search over all the specified blogs...:http://cogdogblog.com/2010/04/19/two-timing-xml/And if you want "instant" results from the custom search engine once you've created it, @mhawksey can show you how:http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/2010/09/google-custom-instant/

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Cris - Sep 4, 2010

Your screencast was awesome, Chris. I created a dashboard in NetVibes, added it to my Symbaloo homepage and now I'm in the RSS feed business. Thanks so much!

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

You are very welcome! I have used NetVibes in the past but always went back to Google Reader. Using it to create a dashboard for an on-line course seems a very good idea though and I'll be experimenting further.

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Tony One of the problems with the simple pipe I came up with was the OPML parser block itself. Although Stephen Downes' OMPL is available as a URL, and therefore in a sense always up to date, the parsing into feeds seems to take too long and the pipe often times out before it can generate results. I need access to the raw data that is being used to create the PLENK2010 daily I think! But thanks for the tips, I'll follow them up.

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Not only did his blog show me how ... @mkawksey went and gone and done it! http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/search/plenk2010.html!

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Linn - Sep 4, 2010

Very interesting! I want try to use an aggregator. But to complicated right now. I just added the link to The Daily as a bookmark on my igoogle, to keep the course separated from the rest in the RSS-reader.

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Chris Saeger - Sep 6, 2010

This is great work. It is just what I was looking for. I was about to ask you for this kind of help in the plenk moode but got your blog info instead. Much easier to connect here. Thanks much, @chris_saeger

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Chris Jobling - Sep 0, 2010

I'm glad it's been useful.

Some new features (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting) were added to my institution’s Blackboard in the last upgrade. It’s very early days but I managed to try some of these out and blog about my first impressions. Here’s my blog entry. It’s hosted on Blackboard so I’m not sure if it will be publicly visible. My apologies if it isn’t! Some of my views are probably influenced by this Slideshare presentation posted by Alan Cann (of Leicester University) which compares *Virtual Learning Environments* (VLEs) and *Personalised Learning Environments* (PLEs).

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Today my wife and I took a walk in Singleton Park and the botanical gardens and I snapped one or two interesting views with my new camera. I love the dramatic silhouettes that large deciduous trees make in the winter!

This image has been converted to Black and White. There are more pictures on Flickr.

jing-test-cmd
Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling

I am grateful to OUseful.info for the post that lead me to try out a new Screencasting tool from TechSmith called Jing. Made by the same company that makes SnagIt (an indispensable screen caspture tool) and Camtasia Studio (a screencasting tool that I covet but can’t afford), Jing is a “couldn’t be simpler” tool for making screencasts that you can share.

The results can be shared with others as videos via (charged for service) Screencast.com [see the headline link for an example], as individual images via flikr (see the image on this post), uploaded to a web site using FTP or saved to disk. It’s a great tool. This should be great for sharing video “how to’s” but as an academic who uses a PC in lectures, it seems possible that I could actually record a lecture with Jing and make it available as a video screencast within minutes of completing a lecture. This is an experiment I’m keen to try next term.

Warning for Vista users: Jing suffers from a problem that I’ve seen with a few apps since upgrading from XP to Vista. When Jing is installed, the user permissions are not set up properly and you have to manually take ownership of the installation folder in Program Files to get it and its shortcuts to show up! After that, it seems to work OK!

André Roberge has created three screencasts on the use of Crunchy. Crunchy is an interactive Python interpretor that runs inside the Firefox browser and can be used to create interactive Python tutorials, library documentation, demos and tests. The principle is similar to “docucentric design” which was explored by one of my PhD students. The key benefit of the Crunchy approach is that documents are just web pages with embedded tasks. It is worth investigating whether Crunchy can be combined with a wiki to add some value to my current research project.

It’s been a while since I blogged, but the reason is that I’ve been on holdiday with the in-laws in Regensburg (Bavaria: see picture) and am undergoing the always time consuming task of catching up with RSS feeds and email. Nearly three weeks worth this time!

I’ve spotted a few interesting things in the feeds that deserve further investigation and commentary, for now just check out the links that are tickling my fancy. These are taken straight from my Google readers starred items.

In the meantime, Happy New Year to (all) my reader(s).

A useful survey of the top 10 programming languages used in web development by Stephen Ward of dailybits.com has been published on ReadWriteWeb. In addition to HTML and CSS, my students have some experience of Java, JavaScript, PHP, ASP.NET/C# and SQL and they see Ruby on Rails in action. So we’re doing a good job of building up a good portfolio of marketable skills at Swansea University.

The Swansea Learning Lab had planned that tomorrow there would be a “lunch and learn” E-Learning Showcase at which I was going to present the “Blackboard Quest”. Unfortunately, due to lack of interest, this session has been postponed. However, as I already had the slides ready, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and share what I was going to say anyway and test-drive a nifty new Web 2.0 feature at slideshare.net, that allows the on-line creation of a narrated slide show (or *slidecast*) to be created. I uploaded my presentation slides and synched it to an MP3 commentary and here it is. If you’re at Swansea, and you want to find out more, some additional material has been made available in the blackboard quest community in Oremi.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/slideshare/ssplayer2.swf?doc=the-blackboard-quest-1193681466746764-5

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Harvard College Extension School’s “Introduction to Computer Science” is running again. This course, run by David J. Malan, is an excellent example of the use of multimedia for distance learning. The 12 week programme (which recommenced on 17th September) is designed for adult learners and distance learning and goes from bits and bytes through algorithms, programming and the web. David invites the world to follow along by making audio and video recordings of his lectures, his notes and additional golden nuggets of content that are provided by his teaching assistants, all available through an RSS feed. Here’s the link: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cscie1/podcast/.

I shall be tuning in, if only because David and his colleagues are really good at teaching and I’m always on the look out for new tips. Plus, I will probably learn something!

After reading OpenLearn Unit Content Feeds via OPML and Click On Series 2 by Tony Hirst (both of which use Grazr: “Easy feed grazing and sharing”), I was today inspired to create a del.icio.us bookmarks and RSS feed aggregator for one of my courses which starts in a week and a half. Here’s a report on my experiences!

First-off I should say that Grazr is a web tool that takes either an RSS feed or an OPML file and, through the magic of Javascript, creates a dynamic feed viewer that can be embedded into any web page. Or altenatively, using the default tools provided, added to your Facebook, or Google start page (among other things). To use it, I first needed to create an OPML feed that would enable me to aggregate my bookmarks, RSS feeds, Podcasts, and other useful learning resources in one place, so I signed into http://www.opmlmanager.com/ and created one.

Next I went to my del.icio.us account and pulled out the RSS feed for my module and added this to my new OPML file. I realised, that the tag eg-259 would be too generic so I created RSS feeds for eg-259:lecture01, eg-259+xhtml to allow some finer granularity. Finally I started to go through my “External Links” page on the Blackboard site to ensure I had all the links in del.icio.us and properly tagged. Next I exported the OPML file from www.opmlmanager.com and imported it into Grazr as a reading list. Finally I created a widget from the reading list which is here:

http://grazr.com/gzloader.js?file=http://grazr.com/data/cpjobling/eg-259.opml

Good hey! A similar widget is also now embedded in the External Links page for this module. The beauty is that this widgets are dynamic and populated from Grazr on page load. As I continue to add new RSS feeds or bookmarks to this on-line reading list, all of the embedded Grazr widgets will automatically be updated. The widgets can be shared using a mailing list feature familiar to Flickr users, and the embeddable code can be grabbed or shared directly from each copy of the the widget itself. And of course, if that’s insufficient, the OPML can be used to create feed aggregators for your students which can be embedded in Oremi or inside their favourite RSS feed reader (did I mention Facebook is supported?).

The limitations of www.opmlmanager.com seems to be that each subscriber can only create one OPML feed per person. This won’t work for my application as I expect that I’ll want a custom feed for each of my modules (or perhaps even aggregated across a whole programme). But it turns out to not really be a restriction because the OPML format is very simple and once you’ve created your first OPML file online, you can either export it as a file, edit the XML code directly, and re-import it or, preferably, edit the XML source on-line at the Grazr site.

Stop Press
As this article went “to press” I noted that Tony Hirst has blogged about the new Grazr 2.0 Beta version which looks awesome and will feature it’s own OPML editor!