Peterbe.com

Today Felinx Lee and I launched TornadoGists.org which is a site for discussing gists related to Tornado (python web framework open sourced by Facebook).

Everyone in the Tornado community seems to solve similar problems in different ways. Oftentimes, these solutions are just a couple of lines or so and not something you can really turn into a full package with setup.py and everything.

Sharing a snippet of code is a great way to a) help other people and b) to get feedback on your solutions.

The goal is to make it a very open and active project with lots of contributors. I'll be accepting and reviewing all forks but hopefully control will be opened up to all Tornado developers. Also, since the code is quite generic to any open source project Felinx and I might one day port this to rubygists.org or lispgists.org or something like that. After all, Github does all the heavy lifting and we just wrap it up nicely.

After about two months of evening hacking I'm finally ready to release my latest project: DoneCal.com

It's a simple calendar that doesn't get in your way. You just click on a day and type what you did that day. DoneCal can be an ideal replacement to boring spreadsheet-like timesheets. And unlike regular timesheets/timetrackers with tags you immediately get statistics about how you've spent your time.

I'm personally excited about the Bookmarklet because I practically live in my webbrowser and now I can quickly type what I've just done (could be a piece of support work for a client) with one single click.

If you're a project manager trying to track what your developers are working on, ask them to start tracking time on DoneCal and then ask them to share their calendar with you. They can set up their share so that it only shares on relevant tags.

I'm going to improving it more and more as feedback comes in. Hopefully later this week I'm going to be writing about the technical side of this since this is my first web app built with the uber-fast Tornado framework

I've been doing more and more web development with Tornado recently. It's got an awesome class for running client HTTP calls in your integration tests. To run a normal GET it looks something like this:

from tornado.testing import AsyncHTTPTestCase
class ApplicationTestCase(AsyncHTTPTestCase):
   def get_app(self):
       return app.Application(database_name='test', xsrf_cookies=False)

   def test_homepage(self):
       url = '/'
       self.http_client.fetch(self.get_url(url), self.stop)
       response = self.wait()
       self.assertTrue('Click here to login' in response.body)

Now, to run a POST request you can use the same client. It looks something like this:

   def test_post_entry(self):
       url = '/entries'
       data = dict(comment='Test comment')
       from urllib import urlencode
       self.http_client.fetch(self.get_url(url), self.stop, 
                              method="POST",
                              data=urlencode(data))
       response = self.wait()
       self.assertEqual(response.code, 302)