Creating Dynamic Web Pages (ZOPE)

[robin at execulink.com]

Hugh Cowan wrote:

>Also, I thought that Dreamweaver was more of just a HTML Editor, while
>something like Zope provided extra functionality, tools, wizards,
>etc.. to allow you to create Dynamic Web-Sites quicker and easier?  I
>am just trying to figure out where to concentrate my search for
>software and tools.

I would very much advise against DreamWeaver and similar tools that
pretend designing web pages is a WYSIWYG activity, which it certainly
is not.

I prefer a simple text editor with some HTML convenience features (eg:
syntax highlighting) combined with a templating system. The text
editor lets you stay close to the HTML and CSS you'll need to know
inside out. (I use NoteTab Pro from Fookes software.) The templating
system provides a reasonable way of reusing "code" and helps enforce
consistency.

There are so many web frameworks because everyone has different ideas
about what they want to do. Zope is the heaviest solution and requires
buying into a completely different paradigm -- web as object space --
that many find unintuitive.

Other frameworks concentrate on low-level process handling to remove
the overhead of starting a new Python interpreter for each CGI
session. But the truth is that most sites don't benefit from this
optimisation. It depends on how many thousands of hits an hour you
expect.

My Wasp framework sticks close to the single document equals single
web page paradigm and operates on a web server strictly through CGI
with no fancy architectural tricks.

It provides session and cookie handling, error handling, logging,
e-mail notification, and post-mortem debugging. Plus lots of prebuilt
modules for the sorts of web tasks people need time and time again.
But mostly it helps organise your code by providing simple but
flexible templating.

It's just one of many.

-- robin
www.execulink.com/~robin/wasp/readme.html