On 3 Jun, 07:30 pm, karnaugh@karnaugh.za.net wrote:
>Hi
>My first time on this list, but most people already know my antics from
>#twisted.web

Hello, Colin!

>Comments/flames/whatever are welcome.

I notice that one of the goals that you provide is to "provide a smoother and more productive entry point" to Twisted development.  While I'm sure that Enamel provides useful abstractions that will be more familiar to people who are familiar with traditional 3-tier web application architectures, there is still a lot of room for a smoother and more productive entrypoint to Twisted/Nevow/Athena development to be provided simply by having better introductory documentation.

I would strongly encourage you (and anyone else interested in this) to consider reporting (and fixing!) bugs in the Divmod tracker related to the ease of use of installing Nevow or Combinator, and in the Twisted tracker related to the ease of installing Twisted.

There's also an unfortunate amount of boilerplate associated with setting up a new Nevow application.  We recently added an "athena-widget" twistd plugin to Nevow to try to mitigate that, but the documentation on getting started with Athena ( http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodNevow/Athena ) is poorly linked, and by turns obscure, obsolete, or incomplete.  There should really be a one-page, one-source-file tutorial for any particular Twisted or Divmod framework, which allows you to gloss over the details to get something demoable quickly.

In other words, we need help!  If you're wondering if there's something you can help to document, chances are there is.  Don't worry if you don't feel qualified to do the best job; anything is better than nothing, which is mostly what we have.