[DB-SIG] Re: [Python-Dev] database APIs

[Magnus Lycka]

At 16:31 2003-02-03 -0500, Kevin Jacobs wrote:
>On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> >  my goal ultimately is to be able to write a file, maybe in
> >  XML or other suitable text file format, that specifies all the
> >  reports i want, that they are just tabular display of records,
> >  generation of an input form, or generation of create / delete
> >  input form.

What makes you think XML will be a better very high level programming
language than Python? Isn't that really what you are saying? And don't
you think that special cases will pop up now and then that will be much
easier to handle in Python than in XML?

I'm sure you are right about constructing something along what you
are talking about, or using one of these available tools, but I still
think Python scripts, using these more abstract tools, is the optimal
tool do describe each form or report in.

What is it you can do in XML that you can't to in a structure of
nested lists etc in Python? There are certainly a lot of things you
can do in Python that you can't easilly do in XML...

>We've thought about that, but had much more luck rendering reports via
>customer code with many helper objects and functions.

Luck has nothing to do with it! ;)

>I'm still working on releasing some of my code so that I can show you how we
>handle some of these cases.  Unfortunately, we have some legally encumbered
>libraries that I have to remove with a chain-saw and then replace with
>clean-room code before I can do that.  Soon though...

Soon... You've said that for years! :( Grumble... ;)

Well, maybe you haven't said soon before, but you have
certainly teased us with this for some time... ;)

Do you mean soon as my four year old son interprets
the word, or do you happen to come from a family of
geologists or astronomers where millions of years are
normal time frames?

Maybe you could just hack in there with the chain-saw and
publish it as it is? If you just give general directions
and let others implement it, it should be clean-room
enough, don't you think? I mean, it can't be a Mozilla-
sized thingie? Right?

Or maybe you should join up with Ian Bicking and add the free
things you can offer to SQLObject?

After all, there aren't really too few OR Mappers, are there? :)



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Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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