I am a beginner in Moodle and I wrote an algorithm in python to learn users profiles. The aim is to create a plugin that provides adaptive functionalities in the Moodle platform based on users' profiles. However Moodle documentation is too large, which makes me confused and I can't find a way to start creating the plugin. There's too much information and no good tutorials for beginners. So what I want to know is:
Are there any good tutorials that I can't find?
How should I begin? Do I absolutely use git?
How should I choose the right plugin type? Is it OK with Machine learning backend plugins, since my algorithm belongs to machine learning area?
Any answer or information would be very helpful!
Ok. Let's see...
The aim is to create a plugin that provides adaptive functionalities in the Moodle platform based on users' profiles. [...] How should I choose the right plugin type? Is it OK with Machine learning backend plugins, since my algorithm belongs to machine learning area?
Moodle is highly modular, meaning that the machine learning/data analytics-related functionality may well fit within a machine learning backend plugin (a python backend is supported), but all the modifications to the platform will probably need separated plugins, depending on the precise character of those "adaptive functionalities".
If you need non-documented extra advice or info about the machine learning backend or, later on, about the specific plugins you may need to write for the "adaptive functionalities", you may ask in the Moodle developers forum (https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=55) and/or join the Moodle Dev Chat in Telegram and ask around (https://t.me/moodledev)
I can't find a way to start creating the plugin. There's too much information and no good tutorials for beginners. [...] Are there any good tutorials that I can't find?
It's very important that you decide first what exactly are those "adaptive functionalities" about, because depending on them you may need to do one kind of plugin or another, and different plugins are made slightly differently (sometimes very very differently). This is the list of plugin types: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_types .
The best way to kick start any kind of plugin development is to install the plugin https://moodle.org/plugins/tool_pluginskel in you local Moodle instance and generate the boilerplate code for your plugin, then start working from there.
About tutorials... the most updated source of dev info is the documentation, but there are some books about general development in Moodle (you may find them in Amazon, Leanpub...). Keep in mind that these books are usually not up to date, so compare their contents with the latest published Moodle version and having in mind the kind of plugin you are after before buying.
Do I absolutely use git?
If you plan to publish your code as a plugin or set of plugins then yes, you will need to publish it in a public repository and then follow the usual plugin review/publication process. Here is the doc about the process: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_validation and here the doc about setting up the Travis automated validation tests for a plugin (this is easier than it sounds) https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Travis_integration#Moodle_plugins
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I am a web backend developer. In the past, I've used a lot of Python and specifically django to create custom APIs to serve data, in JSON for instance, to web frontends.
Now, I am facing the task of developing a mobile backend that needs to provides services such as push notifications, geolocating etc. I am aware of the existing mBaaS providers which could definitely address a lot of the issues with the task at hand, however, the project requires a lot of custom backend code, async tasks, algorithms to perform calculations on the data that in response trigger additional behavior, as well as an extensive back office.
Looking at the features of the popular mBaaS provider, I feel like they are not able to meet all my needs, however it would be nice to use some of their features such as push notifications, instead of developing my own. Am I completely mistaken about mBaaS providers? Is this sort of hybrid approach even possible?
Thanks!
There are a ton of options out there. Personally, I'm still looking for the holy grail of mBaaS providers. I've tried Parse, DreamFactory, and most recently Azure Mobility Services.
All three are great getting started from PoC to v1, but the devil is always in the details. There are a few details to watch out for:
You sacrifice control and for simplicity. Stay in the lanes and things should work. The moment you want to do something else is when complexity creeps in.
You are at the mercy of their infrastructure. Yes -- even Amazon and Azure go down from time to time. Note -- Dreamfactory is a self-hosted solution.
You are locked into their platform. Any extra code customizations
you make with their hooks (ie - Parse's "CloudCode" and Azure's API
scripts) will most likely not port to another platform.
Given the learning curve and tradeoffs involved I think you should just play the strong hand you already have. Why not host an Django app on Heroku? Add on DjangoRestFramework and you basically can get a mBaas up and running in less than a day.
Heroku has plenty of third party providers for things like Push notifications, Authentication mechanisms, and even search engines (Elasticsearch).
All that is required is to drop the right "pip install" code into your controllers and you are off an running.
I am new to learning Python for web development and have decided to go with Flask as my framework of choice as of now. I have chosen this primarily for its bare-bones approach on web development and I want to make as much of my web app custom and on my own as possible. I have made a very basic MVC framework in PHP and would like to make something like this in Python. I was researching some ways to interact with a database and add user login/register support and my original thoughts were that I wanted to do this all custom with my own methods and objects and what not. Similar to how I have done in PHP, so I can learn as much about developing my own back-end efficiently for long term production projects. In some research I found the basic objects in Flask such as Login Manager, Login-Form and Flask-Admin, etc. I don't like the idea of using these nicely packaged things that I have very little control over and have not dev'd custom.
Using that kind of stuff I also feel that I am not learning how all of that stuff works on the lowest level so I could not reproduce some of the benefits they are giving me later on in life when project circumstances change and maximum flexibility, customization, maintainability, and efficiency is needed. Obviously I am not in that position right now, but I DO know how to write this back end stuff in PHP and am just wondering if that means anything as far as managing sessions and Authentication on my own in Python/Flask, or if my thinking is totally out of ocontext and its not even close to managing the same stuff.
It is a really great idea to learn how authentication works at a low level -- it's particularly important as many people never learn this stuff, and it's quite interesting!
What I'd recommend you do is take a look at the official Flask tutorial (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/tutorial/), as it covers a lot of this (working directly with sessions, etc.).
What I would not recommend, however, is using this sort of thing in production.
Using your own authentication code is almost never a good idea -- it's much better to rely on a well supported library that has been audited by other people for security issues.
In the Flask world you've got a couple choices:
Flask-Login: https://flask-login.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Flask-Security: https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-Security/
Flask-Stormpath: http://flask-stormpath.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Of those 3, I really like Flask-Stormpath -- but I'm super biased as I wrote it =)
Flask-Stormpath supports the widest array of customization / etc., and allows you to do whatever you want with it.
Hope that helps!
Flask official doc have some app examples. One of them is MiniTwit a micro Twitter clone. As it is a complete app, you could found much of what you're looking for. If you want to make something greater, try Full Stack Python Flask tutorial
I'd like to ask you about your experiences in developing facebook applications in Python. Which of the popular web frameworks for this language you think best suits this purpose? I know "best" is a very subjective word, so I'm specifically interested in the following:
Most reusable libraries. For example one might want to automatically create accounts for new logged in facebook users, but at the same time provide an alternative username + password logging functionality. I need authentication to fit into this nicely.
Facebook applications tend to differ from CMS-like sites. They are action intensive. For more complicated use-cases, usually some kind of caching for the data fetched from Open Graph API is required in order to be able to perform some queries on local and facebook data at once (for example join some tables based on friendship relation).
I'd definitely prefer popular solutions. They just seem to be much more stable and better thought through. I've previously developed a facebook application in Grails and I as much as I liked the architecture and the general ideas, the amount of bugs and complication that I ran into was just a little bit too much. Also Groovy is still quite an exotic language to develop in, and this time I'm not going to work on my own.
I'm not new to Python, but definitely new to web development in Python. Though after the experience with Grails and all its twists and turns I doubt Python could really scare me.
I would almost undoubtedly go with Django as the easiest and most popular framework for developing any type of web applications, if there's a need for a full-stack framework.
Specifically, in regards to Django's app universe, it is plentiful with many active applications -- but that has its downfalls too. There's no standard application for any 'one' thing, but there are a few applications that will do basically 90% of all that's needed. Sometimes the code is poorly written, but most of the time, the apps work and do what they are needed to do, so there's almost no need for someone to dive right in to the code.
Narrowing down our options, I have had great luck with Omab's Django-Social-Auth, which was absolutely a snap to integrate. It required 3 variables in my settings.py and I was up and running.
The only issue might be if you do not want to use the django.contrib.auth.User model, but, if you are not thinking about using that, I would think about that decision twice :)
To narrow it down even further, pyfacebook is another option for integrating Facebook. It comes with a djangofb application so it's just drop, add to settings.py and all is well. It even comes with an example Django application as part of the distribution. I've had pretty good luck with this application, but, I still think Omab's much easier to integrate.
Finally, Facebook's own python-sdk is easy to integrate from a raw standpoint, where they just give you access to their APIs using a simple Python API. However, it seems to cater more to the AppEngine folks, so YMMV.
I've used Django for quite some time. As of late I use Jinja2 instead. No particular reason, but it's another option
If you do not want to start on Django now. Try learning Flask(which is comparatively a lot easier to begin than Django) and then start building app with Flask.
I've been learning python for use in ArcGIS and some other non-web applications. However, now that I've taken on building a personal website I am interested in using it for web development (as it is the only scripting language I currently know).
I've noticed that there are a lot of these things called "frameworks", such as Django. From what I understand they are just a collection of packages to save you from re-inventing the wheel but I don't really know how they work.
Furthermore, I do not like GUIs, if I need a framework I would like to find one that could be used through a terminal, starts out simple and can be scaled for more complexity when I'm ready. Any advice or ideas on frameworks and why I would want to use one?
The Python web frameworks have nothing to do with GUIs, and can all be used via the terminal.
The benefits of a framework, as you say, are all to do with making your life easier by supplying the components you need to build a website: the main ones are database interaction through an ORM, a templating system, and URL routing. On top of that, the big frameworks also included optional extras like user authentication, administration interface, and so on.
Personally I like Django, but your mileage may vary: I would say, though, that whatever you do with Python and the web will require some sort of framework, even if it's one of the absolute minimal ones like Flask which basically do just the routing part. There's simply no point in writing all this stuff from scratch when it's been done for you.
I'd second the post above: Django is a great framework and will save you loads of time in the long run.
Pretty much every challenge you'll come across when writing a web application will already have been solved, e.g. How do I send emails? What about an admin interface to edit the data? User security?
In my view picking the best framework is all about the ecosystem around that framework. How well used is it? Is it discussed widely on the internet? Have others encountered, and solved, the problems I'm facing?
In terms of where you start, see the Django Tutorial here:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/intro/tutorial01/
If you think Django offers you too much, I'd recommend that you take a look at CherryPy just to compare the different, and much simpler, approach.
With Python, you've got lots of options. To start, I would recommend looking here -- it explains the basics and provides a fairly complete list of frameworks.
If you're looking for something that starts out simple but can also handle more complexity, then you should take a look at web2py. It requires no installation or configuration, has no dependencies, and includes a web server and a relational database. It also includes an optional web-based integrated development environment and admin interface, but you can work through the terminal instead if you prefer.
It's very easy to learn and was designed for ease of use, faster development, and security. You can get a lot done with very little code thanks to the included scaffolding app along with many sensible default behaviors. As things get more complex, web2py can handle it, as it is a well-integrated full-stack framework with lots of built-in functionality, including a database abstraction layer, form handling and validation, access control, web services, and easy Ajax integration.
Personnally, I don't use any framework, I write either from scratch on BaseHTTPServer, or using WSGI (with mod_wsgi).
It is a bit long to write the skeleton, but I think it is faster (I mean at runtime), there is less constraints, and there is lesser to learn.
Does anyone have experience using Python in different variaty of applications?
A little background - I am a 3D artist in an animation studio. I do programming in PHP and use Zend framework for my personal project. Python has always been a language I wanted to learn because it can be used within many applications our studio is using (3D MAX, MAYA to name a few) My supervisor knew about my web background and wanted me to create a web base time line manager for the company. From the requirement I'm expecting quite a simple backend ... so it might be a good opportunity to finally learn Python. The bulk of the work will be on AJAX for the interactive front end.
So if I learn Python with web application and Django in mind, will that limit my Python skill from applying it to other applications?
a little curious about Django features as well. How well does the framework cover in terms of web application compare to Zend? Our application is pretty basic in the back end and I would love to know if Django will be able to cover them.
authenticate against Windows active directory
quick database update via AJAX interaction (drag and drop time line mostly)
Other basic stuff like discussion forum and directory browsing/file manager
So if I learn Python with web application and Django in mind, will that limit my Python skill from applying it to other applications?
No
authenticate against Windows active directory
Yes. You may need to customize an Authentication Backend.
quick database update via AJAX interaction (drag and drop time line mostly)
Django has nothing to do with Ajax. Use piston to create pleasant RESTful API that Ajax can use.
Other basic stuff like discussion forum and directory browsing/file manager
There are many, many canned applications for Django that you can plug in and integrate.
I love python as a language - but it's not the answer to everything. I know this is throwing mud in a python group, but python has one serious limitation - the rigid source code format.
While going through a django tutorial - I noticed that you cannot insert python source code into a template, and that this was presented as a 'feature' for separating programmers and designers.
I later realized that it's a limitation of django - and any other environment where python source code might get accidentally mangled. This also includes HTML WYSIWIG editors and database based 'manglers' (like Drupal).
In my opinion it's a very serious limitation with no easy cure - especially with the need to use other tools to manage the complexity of HTML / CSS / JavaScript.
I found Django a really good way to learn python. There's very little that's quirky, magical or un-pythonic in the framework. A bit of setup and you're away, writing standard python code.