How to Send Mail in Python

There are several use cases how you can send an email message using Python:

1. Plain Mail: an email message with plain text or html content.
2. Mail with Attachment: an email message with attached document.
3. Alternative Mail Views: you provide a convenient way to email recipients to view your message in plain text or html with optional rich content including images, etc.

Here is an example of alternative email with HTML and image:

Let see how this can be accomplished.

How to ship eggs with pyo files only in Python

There is sometimes a need to ship python egg distribution with pyo files only. There is confusion using bdist_egg command since it doesn't have any options to do that; instead, you can instruct install_lib command. Here is what you need in setup.cfg file:

[install_lib]
compile = 0
optimize = 2

[bdist_egg]
exclude-source-files = 1

Issue the following command to build egg.

python setup.py -q bdist_egg

Note, the egg file has only python byte code optimized module files (look at dist directory). You can read about compiled modules here.

Python Web Frameworks Excessive Complexity

Cyclomatic (or conditional) complexity is a metric used to indicate the complexity of a source code. In this post we will take a look at web frameworks source code and estimate excessive complexity, something that is beyond recommended level of 10 (threshold that points to the fact the source code is too complex and refactoring is suggested). Here is a list of web frameworks examined:

1. bottle
2. cherrypy
3. circuits
4. django
5. falcon
6. flask
7. pyramid
8. pysi
9. tornado
10. turbogears
11. web.py
12. web2py
13. webapp2
14. wheezy.web

The source code is hosted on bitbucket, let clone it into some directory and setup virtual environment (this will download source code per framework listed above).

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/akorn/helloworld
cd helloworld/04-pep8 && make env up

The make file has a target for mccabe metric, so issue make mccabe.

Lazy Attribute in Python

A lazy attribute is an attribute that is calculated on demand and only once. Here we will see how you can use lazy attribute in your Python class. Setup environment before you proceed:

$ virtualenv env
$ env/bin/pip install wheezy.core

Let assume we need an attribute that is display name of some person Place the following code snippet into some file and run it:

from wheezy.core.descriptors import attribute

class Person(object):
    def __init__(self, first_name, last_name):
        self.first_name = first_name
        self.last_name = last_name
        self.calls_count = 0
        
    @attribute
    def display_name(self):
        self.calls_count += 1
        return '%s %s' % (self.first_name, self.last_name)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    p = Person('John', 'Smith')
    print(p.display_name)
    print(p.display_name)
    assert 1 == p.calls_count

Notice display_name function is decorated with @attribute. The first call promotes function to attribute with the same name. The source is here.

Duck Typing Assert in Python

People who come from strongly typed languages that offer interfaces often are confused by lack of one in Python. Python, being dynamic typing programming language, follows duck typing principal. Here we will see how programmer can assert duck typing between two Python classes. Setup environment before proceed:

$ virtualenv env
$ env/bin/pip install wheezy.core

Let play a bit with duck test `looks like`. Place the following code snippet into file `test.py`:

from wheezy.core.introspection import looks

class IFoo(object):
    def foo(self):
        pass

class Foo(object):
    def bar(self):
        pass

assert looks(Foo).like(IFoo)