Google Protocol Buffers

Google Protocol Buffers was mentioned on the Python LinkedIn Community.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

Here is the Link to the Python API.

Talking 3.0

I'm embarrassed to say I've hardly touched 2.6 let alone 3.0 but Let's talk about Python 3.0 has some interesting background on the limitations of Python 2.x as well as thoughts on process improvement

This is a startlingly good analogy for the way lots of corporations do things; once a particular process is entrenched (and especially after a couple rounds of employee turnover), there’s nobody left who remembers why the company does things this way. There’s nobody who stops to think about whether this is still a good way to do things, or whether it was even a good idea way back at the beginning. The process continues through nothing more than inertia, and anyone who suggests a change is likely to end up viciously attacked by monkeys.

Of course CentOS5 still only comes with Python 2.4.3, which is what I'm stuck for much of my development unless is compile from scratch.