[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Paul Boddie wrote:
[snip]
> What I'm advocating is this:
> 
>   * That the community provides narrow/thin but *completely
>     separate* components/solutions which offer very well-defined
>     benefits - eg. Web APIs, templating systems, database access
>     layers. These things shouldn't be mixed up in the fundamental
>     system on the pretense of convenience.

>   * That documentation is produced to describe how one plugs these
>     things into each other and how one might go about integrating
>     other functionality into applications.

>   * That genuine solutions for certain styles of application may be
>     made, but not foisted on people from the lowest levels of any
>     given system. Some applications benefit from having .myapp on
>     the end of every Web resource, and by being able to write
>     "hello world" in a text file and have it pumped out dynamically
>     from the server; not all applications do, however.

This sounds good. I think it would be good if Python web frameworks 
turned more into users of a cloud of focused, smaller, libraries and 
mini-frameworks.

I've sighed a few times the last months when I ran into more and more 
Python-based schema and form frameworks. I developed Formulator for Zope 
2 pretty early on, and was involved in 2002 in setting up Zope 3's 
schema framework, so I've contributed to the problem. In the Zope world 
there's also Archetypes, and I heard Archetypes is now working on a new 
generation which redesigns everything.. And I ran into Schevo and I saw 
formencode, which both have a history too, and then finally what made me 
sigh was running into a weblog post by Philip Eby on Spike. It all looks 
all very cool, but how many more do we need here?

I believe that what we, framework developers, need is a bit more 
humility ("We're open, you just all plug into our great solution!" is 
not humble), and more active outreach to include pieces of other 
frameworks. While we also need to do a bit of work of opening up the 
neat bits of our frameworks to reuse by others, but that rather easily 
turns into the non-humble "Use mine!", so I think what we really need to 
do more of is the "Let's look for something to reuse!" variety of 
outreach than the "look, I made mine real great!" outreach (we'll do the 
latter automatically anyway :). I think Ian Bicking has been saying 
similar things.

Zope has historically suffered from a sometimes massive lack of humility 
in this respect, though I think my community is not the only one which 
has been too interested in reinventing wheels. There have been various 
attempts in the past to open things up, and I've chipping away at Zope 
(3) a bit in my own way:

http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/04/15/0

More excitingly, recently there's been an absolutely great iniative by 
others to integrate Zope 3 with Twisted using WSGI, and all kinds of 
coolness may develop from that eventually.

Regards,

Martijn