#django

http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/lates... <3 tastypie

what is REST?

representational state transfer as far as i remember

it's a way to design web services in which all operations against the service take the form of HTTP verbs (mostly GET and POST)

GET is never supposed to modify the state on the server; POST can modify the state

more fundamentally, it's a model for interaction that establishes a client and server; in between requests, the client and server are in a static state, but in between requests they're in transition

the model specifically forbids transitional states in between requests

not sure if that helps...probably wildly inaccurate besides...

and why would you want it

you'd want it because it significantly simplifies the interaction between entities in your model

for instance, if you know that only POST requests modify state on the server, you can cache GET responses and flush the cache when a POST makes the cache dirty

more fundamentally, you can use HTTP as a transport for any RESTful service, since HTTP supports the tenets of REST

(no assumption of persistent connections being the foremost one)

but you can do that without REST?

What is an example of *kwargs in a UrlConf to a view

what does it look like

Siecje: sure, you can do that without REST...REST is just a series of good practices to use when creating a web service, not an actual implementation

if you stick to REST, you'll avoid a lot of problems that you can end up with when designing your own protocols/services that employ your protocols

diphtherial: thanks definetly one of those things that will hit me when I finally get it

:)

REST is unfortunately kind of a buzzword...suffice to say that if you write a service that uses HTTP as a transport protocol and obey the restrictions on GET and POST, then your service is likely RESTful

er...and to be totally rigid about that, technically HTTP is an application-level protocol, but here it's being used as a wrapper for web service calls, so it's a psuedo-transport protocol...

i'm surprised nobody's assaulted me yet about my inaccurate terminology

diphtherial: REST gots a bit further than that

(and tends to use more of the HTTP verbs, too)

what is an example of two things talking?

Siecje: your browser is a good example; when you visit a webpage, your browser makes an HTTP GET request to the server, which then starts sending your browser the page data. when the page data is finished transferring, the server effectively terminates the connection, and your client is considered idle (and the client's state considered complete) until you perform some other action.

(in practice, almost all servers maintain a keepalive connection to improve latency, but this doesn't constitute a persistent connection like it would using some other protocol, like FTP)

diphtherial: psst... "data" is a plural... that should be "when the data _are_ finished"

the idea is that outside of a request-response cycle, both sides of the exchange are considered "complete"

heh, right, thank you

when the datum is finished

i wonder how to relieve myself of all of these gaping holes in my knowledge

i feel like i went too far too fast while learning, and thus have a very incomplete vision of a wide swath of topic

*topics

have a driving thirst for knowlege and understanding

i'm good at breadth, not so much depth

i think i have that, or at least did before life bogged me down

but we use django to do all that?

I think my next big learning drive will be denormalised views in PG

Siecje: Django generates content for HTTP requests

Mmm, materialized views. Tasty.

What is an example of *kwargs in a UrlConf to a view what does it look like

Siecje: def myview(request, **kwargs) ?

Siecje: in the url pattern, it's either a named regex group, or a dict at the 3rd position in the pattern

(or both)

and the dict is static?

will you ever have *args?

sure.. if you have unnamed groups in your regex

why not put the dict in the 3rd position in the view?

The dict in the urlpattern populates view keyword arguments.

Siecje: the url pattern is there to decide (a) which view to call, and (b) what to pass it

Something like this?

url(r'^(?P<pk>\d+)/results/$', views.ResultsView.as_view(), {'something': 1}, name='results')

Siecje: sure

hmm, anyone happen to know of a fairly performant celery backend that installs easily on ubuntu?

i'm having trouble installing rabbitmq

Redis is pretty dead simple..

ah, never mind, apparently rabbitmq is preinstalled

redis is a good idea, though, failing getting this to work

the django db broker works, too

It works, but it's significantly slower.

right, i switched to rabbitmq when i outgrew the django db broker

so far so good getting this set up, except that it seems my ec2 instance doesn't have a rabbitmq user

(i understand you're supposed to run the server instance as that user for some reason)

we used redis... until we ran into problems, and realised we couldn't see what was remaining in the queue

so we switched to rabbitmq.... and we _still_ can't see what's remaining in the queue!

Doesn't celeryctl have reporting for that?

In the polls tutorial test section it has this code https://dpaste.de/1IkzP/.

How is ['<Poll: Past poll.>'] a queryset?

Why wouldn't it be?

mattmcc: not that I've found yet

Siecje: it's not quite... it's the repr of a queryset... which appears to contain 1 item