Roman's Blog

Recently I have made a video tutorial for my Web-PDB debugger for Kodi addons. This is my very first attempt to make a video tutorial so it is far from flawless. But I hope that enthusiasts who develop Python addons for Kodi mediacenter will find it useful. (...)

Previously, this blog run on Django 1.8 and Python 3.4, but after a new Django LTS release — 1.11 — I decided that it's time to upgrade this blog to the new Django version and to bump Python version as well. The upgrade process was simple: I created a new virtual environment, installed all the dependencies and pointed Pythonanywhere to this new environment. The blog itself required only one minor change of the sitemap view because URL patterns no longer accept view names as strings, e.g. 'django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap', but require proper callable view objects (previously, both variants were supported).

Now this blog runs on Django 1.11 and Python 3.5 (Pythonanywhere does not provide Python 3.6 yet).

Recently I've got a good news: my pull request on GitHub to Pybind11 project has been accepted by the project maintainers. Pybind11 is a C++ library for exposing C++ code to Python as binary modules. Pybind11 is similar to Boost.Python but it does not require linking against a pre-built library, so it is easier to use.

My pull request is very small: I've added a method to check Python exception types from C++ code more easily. However, I'm not a professional developer and C++ is often considered a "hardcore language", so I'm proud that Pybind11 maintainers have decided that my small contribution is worthy to be included in their project.

This is the 4^th article in my series about building and using binary Python modules in Kodi on Android. In the previous article I described how to import a binary Python module in Kodi for Android. In this article I will briefly cover 2 C++ libraries used for writing binary Python modules: Boost.Python and Pybind11. (...)

This is the 3^rd article in my series about building and using binary Python modules in Kodi on Android. In the previous article I described how to build a simple "Hello World!" binary module. In this article I will tell you how to use binary Python/C extension modules in Kodi for Android. (...)