Chennaipy April Meet Minutes

Chennaipy met again on the 28th of April, with talks and videos on a wide range of topics. This time around we had about 10 people.

Python Lists

Since there were quite a few newbies, the meeting started off with a short introduction about Python. This was followed by the Python Lists talk by Deepan. He showed the following list operations:

List creation.
Accessing list elements.
Addition of list.
Scalar multiplication.
List comprehension.

Python Dictionaries

The next talk was Python Dictionaries by Rengaraj. He describe how data is stored in the dictionary as key value pairs. He then showed the following dictionary operations:

Dictionary creation.
Accessing dictionary elements.

He then demonstrated dictionaries using an example, of counting the occurences of letters in a string.

MVC Design Pattern

The next talk was on the MVC Design Pattern by Vijay Kumar. Vijay Kumar first described, the importance of design patterns. He then explained a variant of the MVC design pattern. The variant he described was based on MVC pattern used in Apples' Cocoa framework. He demonstrated the MVC design pattern using an address book example. The address book had a form based view written in wxPython. An XML file, parsed into a ElementTree, is used as the model. A control helps to interface between the View and the Model. He also described the advantages of the MVC - like ease of testing, increased orthogonality, and ease of remoting the controller in the future.

A follow up article based on the talk is available at http://www.zilogic.com/blog/tutorial-mvc.html

Video

We had planned for a Pycon video, but Jagadish suggested a YouTube video on the MVC design pattern. We went in for a quick vote after playing both the videos for a minute. People voted for the video on the MVC design pattern. So we went on to play it. The video demonstrated another variant of the MVC design pattern, using Qt.