[Tutor] Web programming advice

[Patrick]

Sorry to create another post and fill up everyones mailboxes but I 
forgot something important...

In terms of searching for documentation I believe you should look to the 
framework of your choice. There is not that much non-cgi related 
programming documentation out there-patrick

Alan Gauld wrote:
> "Patrick" <optomatic at rogers.com> wrote
>
>> I am in the small minority of people who are don't like frameworks.
>
> There used to be a small minority of people who didn't like compiled
> or other high level languages. But they gradually died out... There
> was even a very small community who didn't like assembler, preferring
> to enter binary or hexcodes directly, but they died out very quickly!
>
>> really struggling to get going without one.
>
> Yep, that's why other folks like them! :-)
>
>> You can actually program directly on the WSGI layer. I am trying to 
>> do this. You get CGI like control(actually better) with high performance
>
> Just as you can program a Windows GUI using the Win32 API.
> Or use XLib on X windows. (X in very interesting because it has
> many layers of abstraction designed right in, from XLib to Xt to
> XView/Motif/GTK etc) But its all incredibly painful!
>
>> According to this article there have been changes to 350K lines of 
>> code in Django:
>> http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/sep/03/1/
>>
>> I am sure this is an awesomely powerful framework but how the hell 
>> does anyone understand the magic under the cover with so many lines 
>> of code?
>
> Only the developers do. There are hundreds of thousands of lines in a
> GUI framework too but nobody feels the need to read them all before
> using wxWindows or Tcl/Tk or GTK...
>
>> Are you really programming in Python or are you programming in Django 
>> now?
>
> You are programming in Python using Django.
> Similarly when you import the os module you are programming in Python
> using the os module. If you look at the source for os and then drill down
> to look at the Unix C libraries utilised you will find many thousands of
> lines of code there too, before you ultimately call the OS system calls.
> If you then drill into the system call code (which you can do in Linux or
> Darwin) you will find that they eventually call BIOS routines written in
> assembler. But very few programmers bother reading the assembler
> code for the BIOS routine (interrupt 0x13 from memory?) that writes to
> disk before considering whether they should use file.writelines() in
> Python...
>
> The whole of software engineering is built up on layers of software
> provided by others. 'Framework' is just a fancy name for a particular
> type of layer. If it makes the job easier and delivers acceptable
> performance use it. If not drop down a layer.
>
> Sometimes programming at the lower levels can be useful for learning,
> sometimes it can be a fun challenge in its own right. But if you need
> to get a job done go with the highest level software support you can 
> find!
> Thats why we are using Python and not C, right?
>
>