Sweet and Lowdown

Today, I have mostly been trying out the Django framework. Having installed MySQL, Subversion and Apache 2 on Ubuntu, I got the development version from the repository and installed. Then I followed the tutorial. I’ve never used Python before, but I had little trouble with the tutorial (what trouble I did have was largely self-generated.) Django’s easy to use and the automatic admin stuff is very impressive. I need to try something a little more complicated to see how easy it is to create a “real” web application, but it’s definitely worth a look.

(OK - so the title’s a little tenuous: in Sweet and Lowdown, Emmett Ray is a big fan of Django Reinhardt.)

nspectre 0.8.0

I’ve released nspectre 0.8.0.  Get it here.  The new feature is logging support.  There is an ILogger interface, a Message class (to encapsulate logging messages) and a Level enumeration (to represent the desired level of logging.)  If you want to enable logging, create an implementation of ILogger (hooking it up to your preferred logging framework) and pass an instance of your implementation to Initialiser in the constructor.
The logging support covers a large portion of nspectre.  The notable exception is the ConfigurationReaders.  And if you set the level to Debug, you’ll get all the generated code as well as validation results in the logs - which should help debugging.

Ghosts in the machine

On Roy Osherove’s blog, I found this post about NSpec. Obviously, the name piqued my interest. It (NSpec - and also Specter, which is mentioned in the comments) seems to be addressing a different part of the development cycle compared to nspectre. Whereas nspectre is a run-time framework for business logic (or behaviour) in the form of specifications, NSpec focuses on test time. Specifications written in nspectre are easy to test - but maybe a compelling extension to nspectre would be auto-generation of tests of the specifications or something along those lines.