London Geek Nights: Dirigible and PyCon 2011 talk March 24, 2011

Dirigible lets you build your numerical models in a spreadsheet grid on a web page, putting Python code in each cell — so a cell can hold not just numbers or text, but objects, lists, or even references to functions. If you want to change the way the spreadsheet is recalculated — by writing your own Python functions to call from your formulae, by importing new Python modules (like Numpy or SciPy), or even by running the formulae multiple times until you reach a goal — there's a code editor right there in the page to let you do that.

Once you're happy with your spreadsheet, perhaps you want to access it from other web pages? All Dirigible spreadsheets have an associated AJAX URL, which you can use to access their data from your own sites, or to call them with parameters to write a back-end for your site with minimal coding.

Dirigible sheets are recalculated on a grid of Python-based servers running on Amazon EC2. Imagine writing a model in one sheet to work out the price of a financial instrument, and then writing another sheet that uses 100 computers for a few seconds to price up a portfolio of hundreds of them.

Official Website: http://londongeeknights.wetpaint.com/page/Dirigible+Talk+and+Pycon+Report