---
june meeting:
intros:
- there was at least one new comer and several old timers who decided to show up today, welcome!
- we had one open bsd user (that's new...)
- one suse user... bob i'm pretty sure...
- a ubuntu user, mint, deepin, etc, etc.
meeting topic: "Getting Started with Python Programing"
- the presentation appears to center around flask which is a popular lightweight python based web framework that does many things
- python has packages, which is a collection of python modules
- pip is used to install said packages
- is a package manager similar to a Linux package manager such as apt-get or yum
- virtualenv is a tool to create isolated python environments
- this is basically a way to keep from breaking your system python environment and to give you application its own namespace
- it is also a package that can be loaded with either pip or the os package manager
- python terms
- argument - value passed to a function
- immutable - an object with a fixed value. immutable objects include numbers, strings and tuples. Example: key in a dictionary
- mutable - an object that can change their value but keep their id()
- statement - part of a suite or block of code. a collection of if, while or for expressions
- class - a template for creating user-defined objects
- decorator - a function returning another function, usually applied as a function transformation using the @wrapper
- flask
- based on werkzeug toolkit and jinja2 template engine
- homepage - http://flask.pocoo.org
- werkzeug is a WSGI utility for python
- jinja2 is used in many python projects, similar to django templates
- routes - specific commands are executed by flask when you access a flask router (eg. /dosomething)
- templates can be created with logic (such as iteration) in them.
- variables can be added to the routes for sending data between client and server
- several examples were showed and well all tried very how to explain how decorators work... i'm not sure we did a good job or not because they are mysterious to be honest...
- mike showed a simple https example with flask
- he then showed some example code that was used to create a simple dropbox-like example
- for a simple way to "test" your code try pythonanywhere.com
- there is a free tier that allows you to try their service or you can pay for more usage...
- after that there was conversation about various other python topics such as the benefits of packaging, requirements.txt, console scripts, pep standards etc.
- then we all talked about GitHub and what our favorite GitHub alternative is.
- we all voted that gogs was the best in favor of gitlab and Launchpad (not sure if Launchpad even a fair comparison but hey).
Link to Mike's GitHub Page