On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Steve Schmechel <[email protected]> wrote: > In order to make creating a web application like "configuring an XML file", > your framework must be very opinionated, which Pyramid is not. I think > there are two different audiences here and you are never going to change > Django "configurers" into Pyramid programmers with a great book. > > Maybe they would be better suited with a book on one of the opinionated > frameworks built on top of Pyramid. (Kotti, Ptah, Khufu, Akhet) Those > frameworks have made many of the tough decisions for them and, if one of > them meets their needs, they just need a little help "configuring" it.
Thanks, that's the part I forget. That there are a lot of of Django users aren't like Pyramid users; they don't want to delve around under the hood, and they're not thinking about scalability or long-term maintenance, they just want to get a site built easily and quickly. The magic encourages them to think it is all easy, but then they're depending on magic, which as Guido would say works until it doesn't. The reason I see a market opening for the large number of non-hacker web developers is, I think it's possible to explain Pyramid in a way that's as easy as that, and that's what we've never succeeded at. The fact that people see Pyramid as "hard" even with significant improvements to the manual (compared to early versions of Pyramid), shows that something is missing. That "something" may be books or articles or marketing or such, probably some combination. For instance, a beginners' book could focus on just the basic features; e.g., not getting into traversal, sticking to Mako+SQLalchemy, and adding a few essential opinions like a form library. A more advanced book would say a lot about traversal, with examples, and explain different use cases for contexts, and different ways to make resource trees, and the advantages/disadvantages of merging the resource tree with the ORM. Many Pyramid users have trouble with traversal, even those who are somewhat hackerish. So that's a good target for a book. Especially since that would stand out in a bookstore: one of the few books/frameworks that really facilitates CMS-like applications. I can see a book on Kotti as it matures. Ptah I don't have as much experience with, but possibly. The two fit somewhat different niches. Kotti is more "a CMS that happens to be extendable", while Ptah is "an application framework that happens to have a minimal CMS" (although it may have advanced since then). They would reach different target audiences and thus different books. There could be room for a book that has a few chapters for each, but that would violate the "We want one way to do it" rule. Better would be a book that's mainly about something else, and just has overviews of Kotti and Ptah and other things. Akhet, no. Akhet is a retro future, trying to impose the then-familiar Pylons way on Pyramid. It's like the early 1960s visions of the space-age future, which look quaint now. But it's not even cute like a Quisp<http://psychotronic16.blogspot.com/2011/01/quisp-cereal-television-commercial-1966.html>ceral box is; it's just limiting. Just as Linux went through a "for hackers only" phase and now there are distros that are easy to install and zero-configuration. But it's still easy to take the hood off, and especially, nothing is blocking or discouraging you from doing so. Pyramid seems to fit the same dual niche, at least potentially. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
