This is the fourth part of the django deploy environment, you may find the third part here.

In this part we'll see how to freeze the project requirements, use versioning and prepare all in order to automate the deployment in production with fabric (which will be the argument of the last post, part 5).

Create a requirements.txt

As said in all previous posts, all the packages used by our project have been installed in a virtualenv which is strictly connected to our project. And if you were asking yourself why this is a convenient way to approach the django developement issue here comes the answer.

Activate the virtualenv, go inside the container folder of your django project and then perform this simple command

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

This command simply creates a requirements.txt files which contains all the project dependencies, look at the image illustrating the project folder structure in the part 2, you'll see the same file there.

The nice part here is that you may setup an equivalent environment, with all the dependencies ...

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This is the third part of the django deploy environment, you may find the second part here.

In this part we'll see how to set up nginx and uwsgi to work with our django project.

Let's install and configure uwsgi

Be sure to have the virtualenv activated (see part 2), and then install uwsgi

$ pip install uwsgi

Ok now we have to configure our project to work with uwsgi, open and edit the myproject/myproject/wsgi.py file, mine looks like this:

"""
WSGI config for sic2012 project.

This module contains the WSGI application used by Django's development server
and any production WSGI deployments. It should expose a module-level variable
named ``application``. Django's ``runserver`` and ``runfcgi`` commands discover
this application via the ``WSGI_APPLICATION`` setting.

Usually you will have the standard Django WSGI application here, but it also
might make sense to replace the whole Django WSGI application with a custom one
that later delegates to the Django one. For example, you could introduce WSGI
middleware here, or combine a Django application with an application of another
framework.

"""
import os ...

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Ok, this is the second part of the django deploy environment, you may find the first part here.

In the prevoius post we have seen how to install nginx webserver an some system packages, both in locale and remote, now it's time to start our developement in locale.

Let's create a new virtualenv

The use of virtualenv is incredibly comfortable and lets you keep separated environment for different projects. So first of all create a new virtualenv in the place you prefer

$ mkdir ~/virtualenv
$ cd ~/virtualenv
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages myproject

Done, now we can activate the virtualenv so that every new python package will be installed in it, so

$ source ~/virtualenv/myproject/bin/activate

MySQL as the database server

Why MySQL? Only because I'm easy with it, I know its syntax, I'm accustomed with it and because I use it at work.
But, since the role of mysql in the whole deploy structure finishes here, you may want to use a different db server, more efficient, lightweight and which uses less system resources

In the first post ...

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After googling for a while, asking my guru and some tests I was able to setup a deploy environment for django projects.

The web server is nginx, the database server mysql, I use uwsgi as wsgi server, all the code is versioned using git, the python libraries are installed in a virtualenv, db migration is assured by South and the deploy is automated using fabric.

While writing this post the whole environment is working but I think it may be adjusted in some ways, so let's take what follows as a guideline to improve in many aspects.

I assume we are working in locale and deploying directly to a production server, ignoring the staging phase.

Installing some packages (locale and remote)

To set up the environment we need python >= 2.6, python-dev, python-setuptools, pip and virtualenv, so (in a debian/ubuntu os):

$ sudo apt-get install python python-dev python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install pip
$ pip install virtualenv

Ok that's all, the other python packages will be installed in the virtualenv, so now let's continue installing git and mysql

$ sudo apt-get install git ...

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Let's see two patterns that may be used to have private members in mootools classes.

Private static members

Here is quite simple, it's enough to use a single execution function and js closures and provide the setter and getter methods to change and retrieve the member's values.

var myclass = (function() {
  var _name = null,
      _age = null;
  return new Class({
    initialize: function() {
      // do some stuffs
    },
    setName: function(name) {
      // do some checks here
      _name = name;
    },
    setAge: function(age) {
      // do some checks here
      _age = age.toInt();
    },
    getName: function() {
      return _name;
    },
    getAge: function() {
      return _age;
    }
  });
}());
var myinstance = new myclass();
console.log(myinstance.name); // undefined
myinstance.setName('jack');
console.log(myinstance.name); // undefined
console.log(myinstance.getName()); // jack

So what happens here is that the two variables

_name and _age

are in the scope of the single execution function, and so not accessible from outside. But their value is retained by the returned object which yes can access them since it is ...

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Wow, the first post of the last year of the world...

In the last weeks I've discovered the importance of the semantics rules applied to the web documents (well, really I knew it before, but I had never given it the importance it has).
The html5 specification introduces some new interesting html elements which plays a leading rule in this sense. Here I speak about some of them since many and many articles may tell you the same story and probably in a better way, look at this for example.

With the older html4 and XHTML the semantic structure of the page was determined essentially by the title tag in the head of the document and by all the h1..h6 tags in the body, which all represents an headline in a descendant order. In particular if you wanted to have a semantic structure with only one external root element you had to use only one h1 element. Then you had to use the others (in descendant order) to create semantics subsections.

The html5 specification introduces some semantic elements which may be used to create more complex semantic structures, and solve some situations that couldn't be managed earlier ...

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Il succo è questo:
ho scritto due post sul blog della otto (la tanto cara azienda in cui lavoro), in cui illustro come si possa fare per rendere vim un editor perfetto per sviluppare codice php. Allora siccome sarebbe inutile ripetere qui le stesse cose e soprattutto non ne ho voglia, vi linko semplicemente i due post in questione, buona lettura.

Vim for php programmers parte 1

Vim for php programmers parte 2

jeff-flatpage is a jeff module that lets you store simple "flat" HTML content in a database and handles the management for you via jeff’s admin interface. It is the right module to use for the creation of "About" or "Privacy Policy" type pages, which don't need a specific module and implementation.

So it's ready! The first jeff module for the management of HTML contents is available for the download in the otto github account, release v1.0.

Let's see the main features:

• Management of html pages (date, title, subtitle abstract, text, images, videos, visualization privileges)
• Visualization through customizable templates
• Translations availables for english and italian
• Error pages 404 (not found) and 403 (forbidden)
• Possibility to restrict the access to contents to a set of chosen system groups.

Please for complete instructions about the module installation refer to the README file of the github repository.

Please comment here for general considerations, use the proper github area for bug reporting.

Enjoy it ;)

Sometimes I like playing with html5 and javascript. Today I was playing around with a sort of paint project for mootools. Clearly I used the html5 canvas element and I wrote some tools (pencil, rectangle, ...) to draw in it.

Well, one of the first problems encountered is the need for a undo/redo functionality. Let's see a way to implement such thing.

Essentially when drawing we can imagine we pass through a series of different states. Each state represents the canvas aspect at that time. Clearly we have a continuous set of states, but it would be to "expensive" to consider and implement this way.

So we may consider a discrete set of states, where a new state is created consequentially to a user action (and not time dependent). Let's consider the creation of a new state consequent to a mousedown-mouseup action of the user, in other words a new state is created when the user draws something in one move.

Now imagine to consider three categories: past, present and future.

The present category includes only the present ...

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E' online la release 0.1 di mooTree, un plugin javascript che inserisce automaticamente i controlli per espandere/comprimere i rami di un albero infinito rappresentato tramite una lista html non ordinata (ul tag).

I controlli possono essere facilmente personalizzati con poche righe di css. Il behavior iniziale, ovvero quali rami espandere/collassare inizialmente è controllabile tramite opzioni di classe, data-attributes e classi css (per l'item selezionato).

Per saperne di più vi invito a leggere la pagina del progetto, per capire subito meglio di cosa si tratta, visitate la pagina demo.