PSP, Cheetah, PTL, ZOPE, etc ...

[Geoff Talvola]

At 01:45 PM 8/2/01 -0700, Sam Penrose wrote:
>It's clear that medium-scale development can be done with any of
>these approaches, including the almost plain string substitution that
>my shop uses. IMO the differences should be assessed in the light of,
>first, the people/organizations doing the work. The more HTML work is
>done by non-Python users, the closer to plain HTML the files should
>stay. Also, the more idiosyncratic an approach, the greater the future
>investment in maintaining knowledge of those idiosyncracies.

Along these lines, one advantage of PSP from my perspective as a 
_programmer_ is, it's just one less thing to learn.  I'm working on a site 
that makes use of Webware's PSP.  The thing I like about PSP is that it's 
basically just Python.  Cheetah is another language.  It's a simple, 
easy-to-understand language, but it's _different_ and that would require me 
to switch gears mentally when switching between Python code and Cheetah 
templates.

If you're going to have non-programmers editing the templates, Cheetah is 
certainly a better choice.  If it's a programmer doing the editing, then 
PSP may have certain advantages.

Webware's implementation of PSP also has the nice feature that you can have 
your PSP page inherit from a base class, so calculations and data 
preparation can be factored into your Python base class while the PSP is 
used purely for presentation.  So you avoid the typical ASP problem of 
embedding significant amounts of back-end logic directly into your ASP 
pages.  My PSP pages basically only contain presentation logic.

Of course, this is also an advantage of templating systems like Cheetah.


--

- Geoff Talvola
   gtalvola at NameConnector.com