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"What is Nabu?"

PyCon 2006 Presentation Submission

Author: Martin Blais <blais@furius.ca>
Date: 2005-10-30

Abstract

Submission overview for a presentation about the Nabu text-file publishing system at Pycon 2006.

Contents

Author and Contact Information

Presenter Name:

Martin Blais

Contact:

I can be reached via email at <blais@furius.ca>. I do not use the phone, please use email or chat.

Website:

http://furius.ca

Short Bio:

Background and experience in high-end computer graphics. I've been programming Python for around 5 years, with insatiable obsession. I offer a professional Python training course since July.

Project Home:

More information about the project that I wish to present in this talk can be found at http://furius.ca/nabu .

Categories:
  • Documentation
  • Web Programming
  • Open Source Project

Requested Timeslot

I would prefer a 45 min talk, with around 10 mins for questions, as this would allow me time to present a complete simple example, which I feel would be necessary to really convey what this project is about and its potential, as well as some important subtleties. Otherwise, this talk could be made to fit 30 min.

Summary of proposed presentation

Nabu is a simple framework for general extraction of data from documents which exploits the power of expression of simple text files as a medium to fill a database with entries of various typed informations. It leverages ReStructuredText and the docutils document tree as a channel to provide structure for the formatting of the generic input information.

Some of the most important ideas surrounding Nabu are presented:

It is difficult to quickly explain what Nabu is all about and why I think it has great potential of use by the developer community, because it lies between the boundaries of multiple already well-known applications: Wikis, file formats, Blogs, mind-mapping applications. However, for people who already have developed the ability to edit text files easily i.e. all programmers, Nabu can become a powerful platform for easily entering many kinds of organized data.

During this talk I intend to show an example of building a simple publishing application, probably a blog-like program using a very simple setup (CGI scripts), a little bit of Python code and text files.

Presentation Outline

Intended Audience

All people who use and love simple text files as a way to maintain information. ReStructuredText, Wiki and Blog addicts are the prime interested parties for this talk, but programmers in general--in particular web developers--will find something interesting in this project, because it presents an original tool that could be leveraged to simplify some information input tasks.