Python and Javascript: using the Flot plugin, part 2

In a previous article I sketched the road map for implementing a small web application to present data from a small weather station with the help of PyWWS and the Flot plugin. In this article we tackle the conversion of the pywww/DataStore module to Python 3.

Converting the pywws/DataStore module to Python 3

Because pywws is written for Python 2.x we need to convert it to Python 3 because I don't want to continue developing for Python 2.x now that many frameworks and libraries are converted to version 3. In principle the 2to3 tool should be able to do the bulk of the work but we cannot be sure before we try and test.

For our web application we will only need to use the pywws/DataStore module to get access to stored weather data and fortunately it has no dependencies on other pywws modules. Converting this module with the 2to3 tool and comparing the differences shows only 3 changes:

• the ConfigParser module is now called configparser
• map() returns a map object instead of a list
• open() takes an 'r' mode argument instead of 'rb' in those cases where the result of the open() function is expected to return unicode strings instead of bytes.

The second change is the most fundamental. A map object is a generator and not a plain list. This means is has to be explicitly converted to a list if an operation expects a plain list. For an expansion from a list to a number of arguments this is correctly done by the 2to3 utility. For example, the following line

  return datetime(*map(int, (date_string[0:4],
                                    date_string[17:19])))

is translated to

  return datetime(*list(map(int, (date_string[0:4],
                                    date_string[17:19])))

All in all this is a fairly painless conversion process (but remember that I converted just the Datastore module, although with 455 lines this is pretty big). The next article will show how we implement server side component of the weather application based on PyWWS and CherryPy.