[portland] Werkzeug, web, testing, etc. discussion

[Michael Schurter]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Adam Lowry <adam at therobots.org> wrote:
> This past weekend at NorthwestPythonDay in Seattle there was a lack of
> lightning talks in the morning so I briefly talked about Werkzeug and failed
> miserably to get across why it was so great. Michelle asked me to continue
> it at pdxpython.
>
> One thing I'm always curious about, though, is the suite of tools and
> practices other programmers use to get their daily work done, so I thought
> I'd list out what I'm using now and we can see if there's interest in any
> particular portions.
>
> Web side:
>        - Werkzeug for WSGI glue and url routing
>        - Jinja2 for templating
>
>        (I'm also using SQLAlchemy and Flatland, but there is a more
> qualified person to talk about these in the group.)
>
> Unit testing (not web specific):
>        - nose for test collection, execution, and misc utilities (including
> plugins)
>        - Mox (pymox), Google's mock/stub/expectation library
>
> Functional testing (web specific):
>        - nose, again
>        - Twill for web functional tests, although I talked about this once a
> while ago
>
> Deployment/building:
>        - Paver for project bootstrapping, library maintenance, and
> miscellaneous scripts for deployment and development
>        - Boto for interaction with Amazon Web Services (ec2, s3, and sqs)
>
> Any interest at all? Or are people tired of yet another web talk?

I'd love to hear about Werkzeug.

Fwiw, here are the 2 main stacks I work with:

1.  Custom Stack Smorgaspord:

Custom web framework which is a fairly light stack on top of CherryPy offering:
 - Cheetah-like templating language (very simple, very fast, very
pythonic, very nice)
 - FormEncode for form handling (meh)
 - Easy way to add pools for SqlAlchemy connections and various other
backends & RPCs
 - Routes-like dispatching to controller classes
 - cgitb for tracebacks (it may not be sexy, but it works!)
 - py.test for testing (with a slightly customized mechanize package)

Hopefully bits of that stack will be open sourced in time for PyCon.
Its very unexciting stuff honestly... probably looks very old
fashioned to a lot of people.  However, its surprisingly pleasant to
use.  It does a great job of covering the basics and doesn't get in
your way when you want to extend it.

Probably nothing to present on unless the entire thing is open sourced
since each of the components is about as boring and vanilla as you can
get.  :-)

2.  Django

Django for everything...  thrilling huh?  Traditional setup.py style deployment.


Been playing with Selenium for UI testing, but still haven't done
anything useful with it though.