[ANN] SkunkWeb 3.0 Released!

[Paul Rubin]

Drew Csillag <drew_csillag at geocities.com> writes:
> Mason and SkunkWeb compare rather well with each other, as they do tend 
> to attack the web serving problem in similar ways.

Thanks... a few more questions...

Does SkunkWeb have any automatic workflow (content management) tools
the way Mason does?

>  * Mason and SkunkWeb have a similar approach to their templating languages,
>    but I don't think you can reasonably extent Mason's whereby SkunkWeb's
>    templating language was designed to be extendable.

Can you say why all those template tags are needed?  Do they get you
something that a PHP-like approach doesn't?  PHP just has a <?php ... ?>
tag and you replace the ... with PHP code.

>  * Mason and SkunkWeb both have HTML and data components.
>
>  * Mason and SkunkWeb both have a Request object (though SkunkWeb calls
>    it CONNECTION).

OK

>  * Mason uses Perl, SkunkWeb uses Python.

Advantage SkunkWeb :-)

>  * Mason runs in-process with Apache (under mod_perl), SkunkWeb is
>    it's own daemon (Apache talks to the daemon either by mod_skunkweb
>    or by a CGI) and if you like, can serve HTTP itself directly.

OK... I prefer Skunkweb's approach as long as you don't have to fork
new Skunkweb processes all the time.

>  * Caching.  Mason caches component output to DBM whereby SkunkWeb
>    caches to disk files.  SkunkWeb's cache can be shared between
>    machines as well as managed with filesystem tools.  SkunkWeb's
>    caching interface is also a lot easier to use.

OK, but if you need a lot of caching, is that not a sign that the
template engine is too slow?  I'm even more scared of Zope.  I notice
that www.zope.com says it's served by three separate machines
connected by a load balancer.  I don't know how many visitors they get
but it can't be nearly enough to need that much hardware under any
reasonable page generating system.

I have no direct experience with any of these systems (Mason,
SkunkWeb, Zope) though.  I read the Mason manual a few months ago and
it seemed pretty good, though messy because it's Perl.  I've been
using PHP and have been pretty impressed with it.  Can you add a
SkunkWeb-PHP comparison to your FAQ?  I know that Mason (and SkunkWeb)
do some things that PHP doesn't but I've forgotten what.