Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Here’s an Apple Developer Connection profile of Checkout, a Point-of-Sale application developed in Cocoa and Python, using PyObjC (Python<->Objective-C bridge) to glue the Python-based business logic to the UI and other framework-level Cocoa libraries.

On the value of Python and development process:

Bok explains how this combination contributed to the development efforts. “Using Python and the PyObjC bridge gives you the best of all worlds—Python and Cocoa,” Koen says. “Python is great for unit testing and agile development. Because Checkout manages critical business information, we swear by writing unit tests for everything that even comes close to any financial data.”

Koen continues, “And since Python is interpreted and not compiled, launching a debug session takes seconds. You can make a modification and see the effect of the change immediately.”

(From MacDevCenter.com)

This article in Guardian Unlimited provides a good introduction to SQLite and the story behind it.

Since SQLite is the database used by cool stuff like Google Gears, Apple’s Core Data, and (cough) ProjectPipe, it’s great to see it get positive coverage in a mainstream news outlet.

The article is also a veritable infomercial for automated testing:

Hipp attributes much of the reliability of SQLite to his use of tests. Less than half of the program code is delivered as the database engine. The larger part consists of thousands of automated tests, which exercise the code and check that the results are as expected. “That’s the real key to keeping it working well,” he says.

One of the goals for SQLite was to keep the database library very small (under 250KB). If Dr. Hipp et al. hadn’t spent all that time writing automated tests, I’m sure that SQLite would also have a very small user base as well