Hello,
I'd like to invite you to our first Kamaelia Open Space event. Our theme is "Making Software like Lego through intuitive useful concurrency". Perhaps you want to learn to use Kamaelia, or you're already using it, or you're simply interested in code reuse or concurrency being actually useful in everyday code rather than theory. If these match your interests, please come along. WHEN The day after Euro OSCON, and just before Bar Camp Brussels: * Friday 22nd September 2006 - 11am - 5pm WHERE * FOAM Offices, Brussels, Belgium * Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, 1080 Brussels, Belgium * http://fo.am/contact.html * http://tinyurl.com/hsarl (link showing location on multimap) WHAT http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Home Kamaelia started as an applied research project, at BBC Research, and has an underlying goal of making software systems easier to maintain and create through the use of intuitive and safe concurrency, in the form of components, whilst maintaining performance. It's being fleshed out by creating systems useful in the real world. This approach turns software into systems similar to a number of systems people may be familiar with : Unix pipes (except non-linear is practical), CSP, hardware (especially HDL's), Occam, K'nex and Lego. Components send messages out via outboxes, receive messages on inbox, have zero copy delivery and messages may be any python object including a component. Practical systems using Kamaelia developed to-date include time-shifting digital TV and a variety of network systems, however components exist simplifying the use of audio, video, pygame & Open GL. PURPOSE The purpose of the event is similar to a python sprint. Our aims for this event are to spread what we've learnt with the wider community - for the simple reason we're finding it works for us, and hope it does for you too. This includes - but not exclusively: * To assist people to get started using Kamaelia :-) * Help you copy or tailor our approach to your systems. (eg making our system or approach usable in twisted). * To investigate areas where we can flesh Kamaelia out (eg we have a webserver than can run in a similar manner to seaside, how would you like that fleshed out) * We'd like to assist others using other languages take the lessons we've learnt and apply them in their preferred language. (especially Ruby and C++) * Help attendees integrate their projects with Kamaelia encouraging reuse between projects, bosting the system for everyone (eg integrate pygtk, wxwidgets, pyqt, or other projects you may use or contribute to, building on experience from integrating tk, pygame and open gl) * To share the work done by students during Google's Summer of Code * How to apply this to teaching children to create these systems effectively. (We've noticed that pre-university users of Kamaelia tend to achieve the most using it) * Use of Kamaelia for art and entertainment At the other extreme, we could also like to use the time to share information (if people are interested) on how some of the practical systems we use work since they are likely to be useful to others. Two interesting areas: * Distributed whiteboarding including audio. This is served in an effectively peer to peer manner - extending this to include grid setup (and/or DHT search) would be useful. This is potentially interesting beyond simple whiteboarding since this really forms a simple distributed events backplane * Practical flexible timeshifting either entire channels, and multiplexes or based on programme names Nascent areas perhaps of interest which are include in Kamaelia include a handwriting recogniser (currently at stroke/letter recognition level), graphical systems creation, and a basic open GL toolkit. FORMAT The above list of suggestions for discussion is just that, suggestions. The specific agenda for the event will be decided on the day by those who attend. Since much of what's to be discussed will be new, this will be a cross between a python sprint and open space in format. THANKS TO Finally, many thanks to the very kind people at FOAM - http://fo.am/ for hosting this event, it is very much appreciated. WHAT NEXT If you're interested in coming, please email your interest either to me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or to the kamaelia mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you know someone who you think is interested in the theme, could benefit from coming - for example someone interested in making practical concurrency safer and easier to use in future - please don't hesitate to forward this invitation to them. Hope to see you there! Michael -- Michael Sparks, Senior Research Engineer, BBC Research, Technology Group [EMAIL PROTECTED], Kamaelia Project Lead, http://kamaelia.sf.net/ This message may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list