[Web-SIG] JavaScript libraries

[mike bayer]

> Now I am beginning to find some time for my happy workflow hacking...
> and things have changed a lot, it seems. I think it's about time for
> it to happen. It may seem a little bit simplistic of my part, but I
> truly believe that the programmer's nirvana can only be attained when
> we manage to hide the dozen different tools that are necessary today
> behind a single & comprehensive framework. It makes no sense to me
> that we have to learn Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS & SQL -- at a
> minimum! -- to become productive in this profession.
>

I can see the great value of abstracting away javascript events into a
clean Python layer, so that custom application logic from client to server
back to client again is coded in pure Python.  All the Ajax libraries are
trying to achieve this in various ways.

I would agree less with regards to HTML and CSS, where I'd rather have
HTML designers bringing their pre-made pages to me (and also allowing them
to maintain the layout)...its less like a low level application library
and more like the graphical facade placed on an application.  Of course if
someone ever designed a graphical WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor that could do
everything any designer ever wanted, and it generated sets of Python
objects, that might make it more practical.

With SQL an excessive amount of abstraction on the query side makes it
hard to analyze and optimize queries, factor out performance bottlenecks,
or to interface well with DBAs who would prefer to dictate the style and
shape of queries from a pure SQL perspective.  Abstration of the
object-relational properties of result sets are a lot easier to manage, if
you can flexibly define the information that should come out of those
result sets.   I think the query side of SQL wont be totally ignorable
until true object databases begin gaining widespread acceptance.