building a web interface

[Shel]

Thanks for your help.

I know that they have Python and mySQL.  They have mySQL set up so
that they just have to create the db, which they've already done and
I've defined the tables and modified the data and whatnot, so that
seems good.  Not sure about mod-python v. mod-wsgi.

Ah, the Django thing makes more sense to me now.  I couldn't quite
figure out what the heck they were talking about in the description of
it.

Shel

On Nov 20, 4:19 pm, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr... at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:40:16 -0800 (PST), Shel
> <joralemonshe... at gmail.com> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.general:
>
> > What I would really like is to find a GUI tool to design the interface
> > that would have customizable templates or drag-and-drop elements or
> > something, so I wouldn't have to code much by hand. Something easy, if
> > such a tool exists.
>
>         In original pure HTML, such would be rather meaningless... Pure HTML
> leaves the presentation (the rendering) of the page up to the user's
> browser. Layout of one item against another is only relative (form field
> 2 comes after form field 1). And I've seen some rather ugly pages
> produced using so-called graphical design tools (like layers of
> <i><b><i><b> text </b></i></b></i> because the tool isn't smart enough
> to find and remove prior tag pairs when one changes intent... I've also
> seen <i><b> text </i></b>).
>
>         Frames were one attempt at dividing a browser into regions in which
> some stuff could stay constant while others are scrolled.
>
>         Then you get the hoard that creates things like transparent GIF
> files with a few pixels to create "spacing" elements...
>
>         I tend to use an ancient copy of HomeSite 5 for HTML editing --
> though I don't do enough such to justify taking the time to define
> things like Django's templating tags as standard types. I prefer to edit
> in the original intent of HTML -- as a mark-up language which identifies
> WHAT a construct is, but does not bother with HOW/WHERE that construct
> is rendered. If I really need something looking more like a newspaper
> layout I'd define a table and use combinations of row and column span to
> "grid" the contents as desired -- and even that would still use
> proportional spacing (90% of browser width, say) rather than absolute
> pixels (845 pixels wide).
>
> > Also would prefer something that I would be able to install/use
> > without having much access to the server where the site will be hosted
> > (on a university server that I don't have control over). I don't fully
> > understand how a lot of the tools I have been looking at work, but it
> > seems like they're often things where you'd have to get an
> > administrator to do stuff on the server (is that right?), which I
> > would prefer to avoid.
>
>         First step -- find out what toolset the server uses; Apache with
> mod-python? mod-WSGI? Do they even have Python available? and if so,
> what version (do they have MySQL available AND MySQLdb, and how much
> control will they give you -- MySQL administration could be set up to
> where they have to create the database AND table definitions, and all
> you get is read/update/delete data privileges... Or they create the
> database with no contents but your account has table manipulation
> privileges within that database... Can you administer your database vie
> direct login to the MySQL server, or do you have to go through some
> web-based interface?).
>
> > It looks like Django has some sort of standalone implementation, but
> > I'm not clear on how that would work or how much of a learning curve
> > there would be for using it.
>
>         The "standalone" is a development/debug server mode running on a
> non-standard port number (HTTP is privileged port 80, these types of
> development servers often run on ports 8080, 8081, etc. as one does not
> need to be superuser to bind to the port number). It is not meant as a
> production server. Instead one has the real server configured to run the
> application (Django and similar are not simple stand-alone CGI scripts;
> pages are _methods/functions_ within the application which generate the
> page contents and return them to the server for delivery).
>
> --
>         Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
>         wlfr... at ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/