On IBM's iSeries and OS/400 roadmaps

Resin: The Instant Application Server

I have downloaded Resin, as a response to worries about Tomcat, but I haven't had a chance to play with it just yet - Tomcat hasn't caused us any problems yet!

The Python Web services developer: XML-RPC for Python

Examples, with narrative, of XML-RPC clients and servers. Nice and simple - it seems like XML-RPC and Python are good partners!

Via Babu.

A new, Unicode friendly release of wxPython is out.

wxPython is the force behind Boa Constructor and PythonCard, and seems to be the most popular GUI toolkit for Python at the moment. It might even achieve critical mass some day.

Don't know wxPython? Documentation for beginners used to be scarce, but it's coming on stream now - see IBM's tutorial, and the wxPython site's own tutorial.

Java layout managers are a total pig - I can't tell you the hours I've wasted fiddling, trying to get my GUIs to look just right.

Of course, things might have gone more smoothly if I knew what I was doing. ;-)

In the end, I ended up writing my own layout manager. But I don't think that I'd have had to had this been available at the time - RelativeLayout, a Constraint-Based Layout Manager.

The first four chapters of David Mertz's Text Processing in Python are online.

Fascinating stuff - I shall certainly be picking this up when it comes out - whenever that might be.

Only today, I was asked for a good RE tutorial, and I was able to recommend chapter 3.

I'm working through Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Ed at the moment. It's making my head hurt, but I'm learning a lot.