New Karrigel page in Wikipedia

[Eric S. Johansson]

Luis M. González wrote:
> For those interested in the simplest, easiest and most pythonic web
> framework out there, there's a new page in Wikipedia:

this all depends on your criteria for simplest and easiest.  For me HTML 
is pure hell.  I avoid it whenever possible because it literally makes 
my hands hurt (worse).  It's a pain to modify unless you have a WYSIWYG 
editor and even then it's still difficult.  Stuffing it into Python 
strings is a double pain because you have to figure out how may times 
you have to quote your percent signs depending on how may times you 
render a string.

A year or so ago, I discovered aether (google aether manual) and my 
heart was filled with joy because here was a markup language I could 
dictate using speech recognition and save myself a great deal of pain 
when producing web applications.  Or so I thought.

[bold language is reasonably [bigger simple]] and unlike most 
higher-level markup languages, it's built out of English words,'[', and 
']' which is why it is handicapped friendly. The other advantage of this 
framework is that it is easy to build your own [words and build 
application specific vocabularies.

But aether by itself brought sorrow with it as well.  The original 
creator was no longer interested in extensions and the ability to create 
CGI programs was flawed.  So in conjunction with an unnamed accomplice, 
we set about expanding aether and renamed the project Akasha.

I simplified the CGI environment significantly.  the simplifications 
make creating CGI significantly easier than with the traditional python 
module.  Each displayed page or page hierarchy is associated with an 
object.  Each object uses the __init__ method for the usual (i.e. 
instance, and variable initialization).  The page_init method is called 
before a page is rendered and displayed.  This gives you the ability to 
dynamically create markup elements before rendering the page the first 
time.  additional methods can be added and provided one follows the 
right naming convention, associates each method with a HTML form button.

once the button has been pushed, all of the CGI variables are stuffed 
into a dictionary.  Returning data from CGI is simple as well.  there is 
a dedicated dictionary which contains information that can be revealed 
in a rendered page.

The nice thing about this structure for me is that the markup 
environment doesn't embed any Python but there is a clear channel for 
communicating both data and markup notation to the display side of the 
house.  I'm not happy that I have markup in my Python but at least I can 
  restrict how far it spreads.

Akasha is not perfect, it's not full-featured, it doesn't have any 
databases associated with it (thank god), but for me it's a dream to use 
in contrast to the half a dozen web frameworks I tried.

if you want to play with it, let me know and I will update CVS at 
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/akasha with the current work in 
progress

--- eric

ps. If you check wikipedia it has some rather amusing uplifting 
definitions for Akasha and Akasha records.  Although on bad days I think 
of Akasha as a code sucking vampire draining the life out of my hands.