You're welcome :-) My thanks go to Chuck Esterbrook for inventing this extraordinary project (maybe the prime father of all Python web frameworks ;-) and to the other developers who contributed so much good stuff over the years. It seems almost incredible, but Webware is in fact over 8 years now.
This seems to be the right time to start a discussion about the future of Webware. I'd like to hear your opinions. Don't worry, I will continue to maintain Webware and keep it alive, but I think it's obvious that it does not make much sense to put more development efforts into the project. When Webware was started, Python was still version 1.5, and so it was designed in a different way from how we would do it today. There was no setuptools (not even distutils I fear), so Webware invented its own plugin mechanism, there was no unittest module or sophisticated functional testing tools, we had no good tools for documentation like docutils or Sphinx, naming conventions were not settled yet, so Webware was using different naming conventions than we would use today. Webware was one of the first frameworks to support a templating engine (PSP) and a ORM (MiddleKit), but these tools have not been developed further and there are more capable, generally usable tools of that ilk today, like Genshi or SQLAlchemy. Webware didn't care much about unicode, character encodings and i18n since these were not much supported back then. Webware's threaded application server was great at that time, but today we would need multiprocessing to fully utilitze multicore processor machines because of the GIL problem. And there was no WSGI standard, so a lot of specialized webserver adapters had to be invented which are hard to maintain. For all of these reasons, I think Webware as we know and like it has come to a dead end. Of course it would be possible to fix all these things, but then Webware wouldn't be Webware any more, and I think it makes more sense to put these efforts in newer projects such as Django or TurboGears. Even the names "Webware" and "WebKit" have become a bit problematic today... So, my idea is the following: Instead of embellishing and improving Webware, we'll start to scale back and streamline things. The 1.0 branch (compatible down to Python 2.0) will continue to be maintained with fixes and adaptations. An upcoming 1.1 or 1.5 version will remove all the old cruft that is required for backward compatibility down to Python 2.0; instead it will require Python 2.4 (maybe even 2.5) and use more modern and efficient code. Some of the old unmaintained adapters and stuff will be removed. The 2.0 version will then remove all old and unmaintained plug-ins and mainly focus on WebKit. It will also move to setuptools for installation and Sphinx for documentation. The 3.0 version will become even more slim and modern. It will get rid of the application server alltogether, and work with WSGI and Python 3. This is only a vague plan and may change depending on how things develop. Let me know if you have better ideas. Also, let me know which features and plug-ins you're using and want to be maintained at all costs and which you think can be suspended. -- Christoph ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Webware-devel mailing list Webware-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-devel
