Hey,
Paul Boddie wrote: [snip]
What I'm advocating is this:
* That the community provides narrow/thin but *completely separate* components/solutions which offer very well-defined benefits - eg. Web APIs, templating systems, database access layers. These things shouldn't be mixed up in the fundamental system on the pretense of convenience.
* That documentation is produced to describe how one plugs these
things into each other and how one might go about integrating
other functionality into applications.
* That genuine solutions for certain styles of application may be
made, but not foisted on people from the lowest levels of any
given system. Some applications benefit from having .myapp on
the end of every Web resource, and by being able to write
"hello world" in a text file and have it pumped out dynamically
from the server; not all applications do, however.
This sounds good. I think it would be good if Python web frameworks turned more into users of a cloud of focused, smaller, libraries and mini-frameworks.
I've sighed a few times the last months when I ran into more and more Python-based schema and form frameworks. I developed Formulator for Zope 2 pretty early on, and was involved in 2002 in setting up Zope 3's schema framework, so I've contributed to the problem. In the Zope world there's also Archetypes, and I heard Archetypes is now working on a new generation which redesigns everything.. And I ran into Schevo and I saw formencode, which both have a history too, and then finally what made me sigh was running into a weblog post by Philip Eby on Spike. It all looks all very cool, but how many more do we need here?
I believe that what we, framework developers, need is a bit more humility ("We're open, you just all plug into our great solution!" is not humble), and more active outreach to include pieces of other frameworks. While we also need to do a bit of work of opening up the neat bits of our frameworks to reuse by others, but that rather easily turns into the non-humble "Use mine!", so I think what we really need to do more of is the "Let's look for something to reuse!" variety of outreach than the "look, I made mine real great!" outreach (we'll do the latter automatically anyway :). I think Ian Bicking has been saying similar things.
Zope has historically suffered from a sometimes massive lack of humility in this respect, though I think my community is not the only one which has been too interested in reinventing wheels. There have been various attempts in the past to open things up, and I've chipping away at Zope (3) a bit in my own way:
http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/04/15/0
More excitingly, recently there's been an absolutely great iniative by others to integrate Zope 3 with Twisted using WSGI, and all kinds of coolness may develop from that eventually.
Regards,
Martijn _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
