Pythonic way of web-programming

[Andy Robinson]

On 16 Apr 2003 00:35:05 -0500, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 03:11, Alex Martelli wrote:
>> However -- look at the XML situation for contrast.  There IS just such
>> a standard (and parts of it ARE in the standard libraries, while others,
>> PyXML stuff, integrate as seamlessly as they can with those via some
>> import tricks).  AND YET -- you guys have developed and maintain PyRXP,
>> which uses substantially different interfaces -- *AND WELL IT DOES*,
>> because thanks to the different interfaces (trees of bare tuples, or
>> lists as the case may be, rather than intricate objects as in DOM) it
>> can save a LOT of memory, and generally zip along much, much faster.
>> 
>> Aren't there analogies here...?  

I m having a little trouble following this as my newsreader does not
show my own post and the first day of replies (hardly a surprise
with BlueYonder), but I will try to infer what went between.

I did gripe a lot about Python's XML tools up to about 2 years ago,
but the main driver was the general lack of how-to documentation.
This problem has been very well addressed in PyXML and in
several good books, and Python does have a clear standard now.

We went our own way for what I hope are very clearly stated
reasons on the pyRXP page.  Also, RXP is GPL, which killed
any plans to try and get it into the Python distro - I tried
to get that changed but could not.  But I do have a "roadmap" to 
bring that back into the fold one day.
1. The "tuple tree" structure and a standard getattr-based DOM-like
wrapper for it (whih I know Alex has been playing with) could be in
the Python XML package or even the standard library
2. A modest change to pyexpat would let it be generated at C-like
speeds without pyRXP
3. If you can bear GPL - or pay us :-) - you can use pyRXP for
validation.  But you won't really need it to get the speed of our
approach.


Finding the time to execute the plan is of course much harder - it
might happen if some huge corporate swallows up ReportLab and 
pays us to write cool code, but we now have a "solved problem"
so it's hard to really get wound up for it.  

I'll join in with the rest when i find the intervening
2 days somewhere :-)

- Andy