Chaps at riothouse production asked me to make an Android application for their sexroom sessions (no it is not a porno website, but a live music sessions records), so I'm tackling to the task !

Tentacles is a python ORM (Objec-Relational Mapper) written in python.

Python ORMs usually try to map SQL syntax with python classes (see django or sqlalchemy samples).
Tentacles is going the opposite direction, trying to express queries in "'python natural language'''.

Declarative part

Objects declarations in Tentacles is looking quite similare to what is done in Django: A class is mapped to a Table in a database (or more generally to a storage unit - think of non-SQL storages, like LDAP or MongoDB); store fields must be expressivly described (with thre type and capabilities)

Example:

from tentacles import Storage, Object, fields, filter
db = Storage('sqlite3::memory:')

class Constructor(Object):
   name   = String()

class Car(Object):
   model         = String()
   power         = Integer()            # in horsepowers
   constructor   = Reference(Power)       # a Car as one unique constructor

Querying part

Tentacles bring to manipulate stored datas as you do for basics python objects. To acheave that goal, Tentacles extend filter and map functions to allow their use with Tentacles objects.

Example:

# get all 'De Dion-Bouton' cars, ordered by model
cars = filter(lambda c: c.constructor.name == 'De Dion-Bouton', Car) >> 'model'

# get 10 first cars having power > 100 hps
cars = filter(lambda c: c.power > 100, Car)[0:10]

<< and >> operators are use to sort results, while brackets are used to limit result size (in the same manner as for a python list)
(NOTE that both are done at SQL level, not on python results)


In conclusion, this short introduction shows you the basic aims and capabilities of this new library. I invite you to download and install Tentacles and play with to discover all its possibilities.

• Reblok homepage
• source code (0.1.1 currently)

Following a migration of the server (new hardware and a debian update), the Dare-Dare website was partially broken: both non-working demo and source code archive unavailable for download. This outage has been fix, and the website is now completly usable.

And I used this occasion to update the dare-dare backoffice program, namely Dare-Dare.py. It is in charge of converting source document pages to png images (then sent and displayed in the html/javascript interface).
With new debian version (6.0 aka squeezy), I could replace external programs calls (pdftoppm and convert, from ImageMagick) by use to python librairies: python-poppler and Python Imaging Library (PIL). The result is a simplified code and huge increase of images rendering speed !

• Dare-Dare homepage
• Dare-Dare démo
• source code (version 0.2)

Deskbar-wordreference is a plugin for the GNOME deskbar applet, for translating words.

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