amfast is a new remoting library  that looks to be as sweet as pyamf (where sweet == fast and useful).  I am checking out amfast now but the speed boost alone might be worth it.  For instance, working with real-time games, when you need static content you need to grab that quickly sometimes via a content service.  The faster that link the better. It also has Twisted integration which is great for networking and SQLAlchemy integration which is in my opinion the best ORM for python (pyamf has twisted, django, pylons, sqlalchemy as well)

amfast is well documented and has some great examples.  If you have the Python addiction, check it.

Description

• AmFast is a Flash remoting framework for Python.
• AmFast can use AMF to communicate between Python and Flash, Flex, and any other system that supports AMF.
• AMF is a binary object serialization protocol used by Actionscript based applications.

Server Features

• Support for NetConnection and RemoteObject RPC.
• Support for Producer/Consumer ‘push’ messaging with HTTP polling, HTTP long-polling, and real-time HTTP streaming channels.
• Support for authentication with NetConnection and RemoteObject.
• Flexible Target mapping system to map message destinations to invokable Target objects.
• Support for ChannelSets with multiple Channels to expose resources in different ways.
• Built in Channels for CherryPy, Twisted Web, and plain WSGI.
• Support for configurable Endpoints. Use AmFast’s built-in AMF encoder/decoder C-extension, or use an external AMF encoder/decoder, such as PyAmf for a pure-Python implementation.

AMF Encoder/Decoder Features

• AMF0/AMF3 encoder/decoder written in C as a Python extension for speed.
• More than 10x faster than the PyAmf encoder/decoder (even when using PyAmf’s optional C-extension).
• Map custom classes with ClassDef objects for complete control over serialization/de-serialization.
• Full support for IExternalizable objects.
• Data persistence with SqlAlchemy including remotely-loadable lazy-loaded attributes.
• Actionscript code generation from ClassDef objects.

How to Use

Use this script by scheduling it to run nightly or when you choose. Then make a folder under it called target or change the location in the script.

The file that will export will be a complete sql dump and stamped like the following filename, it contains the zipped up database.sql file that is your backup:
export-2009-02-03-Tuesday.zip

If you need to change settings to get flat files or other read on mysqldump utility to pass the options you need, currently it backs up in SQL format.

The Script

import os, time, sys, zipfile, datetime,calendar
from os import sep
 
# Script Parameters
# Target Directory for final Zip files
target_dir = r'target'
copy_dir = r'copy'
# The name of the sql file (this will be the same for all backups)
file_name = 'databases.sql'
# Authentication
user = '[YOUR USER]'
password = '[YOUR PASSWORD]'
# The command for the mysql dump. This could include the entire path to the executable if mysqldump is not on the path environment variable
dumpcmd = r'mysqldump'
# The host you want to connect to
host = 'localhost' 
 
args = [dumpcmd, '-C', '-f', '--host=%s' %host, '--user=%s' %user, '--password=%s' %password, '--result-file=%s' %file_name, '--all-databases']
 
os.chdir(target_dir)
cmd = ' '.join(args)
print 'Running Command: %s' %cmd.replace(password, '*'*len(password))
os.system(cmd)
 
# Below is for zipping the files and creating a redundant  backup
def getZipFileName():
	# Set time variables (
	# Note: you don't have to use some of them,
	# but they make the script easier to understand
	t = time.time(); g = time.gmtime(t)
	year = g[0]; month = g[1]; day = g[2]
 
	try:
		datetime.date(year, month, day+1)
	except:
		# Last day of the month, return month name
		root = time.strftime('%Y', g)
		if not os.access(root, os.F_OK):
			os.mkdir(root)
		return os.path.join(root, '%s.zip' %time.strftime('%b'))
 
	if int(time.strftime('%w', g)) == 0:
		# Last day of week, return week number
		cal_month = calendar.monthcalendar(year, month)
		for week in cal_month:
			if day in week:
				return 'Week%i.zip' %month.index(week)
	# Just a regular weekday...
	return '%s.zip' %time.strftime('%A')
 
# Write the zip file
zip_name = 'export-' + str(datetime.date.today()) + '-' + getZipFileName()
zip_file = os.path.abspath(zip_name)
zip = zipfile.ZipFile(zip_file, 'w', zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
zip.write(file_name)
zip.close()
 
# Remove uncompressed sql file
os.remove(file_name)
to_path = os.path.join(copy_dir, zip_name)
to_dir = sep.join(to_path.split(sep)[:-1])
if not os.access(to_dir, os.F_OK):
	os.makedirs(to_dir)
if os.access(to_path, os.F_OK):
	os.remove(to_path)
shutil.copy(zip_file, to_path)

Tips for Generating Good Feeds

RSS and Atom are easy to work with, but like any new format, you may encounter some problems in using them. This section attempts to address the most common issues that arise when generating a feed.

• Distinct Entries — Make sure that aggregators can tell your entries apart, by using different identifiers in rdf:about (RSS 1.0), guid (RSS 2.0) and id (Atom). This will save a lot of headaches down the road.
• Meaningful Metadata — Try to make the metadata useful on its own; for example, if you only include a short <title>, people may not know what the link is about. By the same token, if you shove an entire article into <description>, it’ll crowd people’s view of the feed, and they’re less likely to stay interested in what you have to say. Generally, you want to put enough into the feed to help someone decide whether they should follow the link.
• Encoding HTML — Although it’s tempting, refrain from including HTML markup (like <a href="...">, <b> or <p>) in your RSS feed; because you don’t know how it will be presented, doing so can prevent your feed from being displayed correctly. If you need to include a a tag in the text of the feed (e.g., the title of an entry is “Ode to <title>”), make sure you escape ampersands and angle brackets (so that it would be “Ode to &lt;title&gt;”).
• XML Entities — Remember that XML doesn’t predefine entities like HTML does; therefore, you won’t have   © and other common entities available. You can define them in the XML, or alternatively just use an character encoding that makes what you need available.
• Character Encoding — Some software generates feeds using Windows character sets, and sometimes mislabels them. The safest thing to do is to encode your feed as UTF-8 and check it by parsing it with an XML parser.
• Communicating with Viewers — Don’t use entries in your feed to communicate to your users; for example, some feeds have been known to use the <description> to dictate copyright terms. Use the appropriate element or module.
• Communicating with Machines — Likewise, use the appropriate HTTP status codes if your feed has relocated (usually, 301 Moved Permanently) or is no longer available (410 Gone or 404 Not Found).
• Making your Feed Cache-Friendly — Successful feeds see a fair amount of traffic because clients poll them often to see if they’ve changed. To support the load, Web Caching can help; see the caching tutorial.
• Validate — use the Feed Validator to catch any problems in your feed; it works with RSS and Atom. Also, don’t just run it once; make sure you regularly check your feed, so that you can catch transient errors.

Feed Tools

This is an incomplete list of tools for creating feeds and checking them to make sure that you’ve done so correctly. Note that there are many more libraries that help parsing feeds; these haven’t been included here because this tutorial focuses on the Webmaster, not consumers of feeds.

• xpath2rss — Tool for scraping Web sites using XPath expressions (a method of selecting parts of HTML and XML documents).
• Site Summaries in XHTML — Online service (also available as an XSLT stylesheet) that uses hints in your HTML to generate a feed.
• myRSS — An online, third-party automated scraping service. Doesn’t require any special markup.
• RSS.py — Python library for generating and parsing RSS.
• ROME — Java library for parsing and generating RSS and Atom feeds, as well as translating between formats.
• XML::RSS — Perl module for generating and parsing RSS.
• Online Validator – Check your RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds.

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