[ANN] Wasp: yet another HTML preprocessor and CGI framework

[robin.escalation at ACM.org]

Wasp is an platform-independent open-source HTML preprocessor and CGI
framework written in Python. 

The designer creates template files using a mix of HTML and simple tag
extensions. The programmer creates Python modules to access databases,
manage files, perform calculations, or any other desired task. Then,
Wasp converts these templates and code snippets to standard HTML
files. By maintaining a library of standard components, you can easily
assemble complete sites from discrete parts. This eliminates
repetitive markup coding, helps maintain stylistic conformity
throughout your site, and correctly partitions the design and
programming tasks of building a web application.

Wasp may be run in two ways. In static mode, templates are processed
in a batch to produce HTML files. This is useful for people without
access to CGI, or who wish to serve static files for performance
reasons. In dynamic mode, templates are processed on-the-fly (mmm...
flies) through CGI, for maximum flexibility. Wasp provides a CGI
application framework, complete with error handling, logging, e-mail
notification, and post-mortem debugging.

Examples of the included snippets are SourceDoc() which automatically
produces pretty HTML documentation from the doc strings embedded in
your source code and GanttChart() which creates a nice HTML Gantt
chart from a tab-delimited data file. 

The powerful tag extensions include SEQ which produces standard
pre/next/up/home navigation bars and INDEX which reads meta tags to
automatically create an index page for a site. Of course there is
support for macros, include files, conditional code generation, and
execution of arbitrary Python code.

Full documentaion and examples are included.

Wasp is available at:
http://www.execulink.com/~robin/wasp/readme.html

It also has a page at the Vaults of Parnassus:
http://www.vex.net/parnassus/

There are many other tools which attempt to do at least part of what
Wasp does. Most suffer from incompleteness, inflexibility, lack of
documentation, or some other drawback. But you be the judge. Check out
Cameron Laird's page which summarises the available templating and CGI
tools:
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.lang.python/web_python.html

Wasp is open-source under the GNU General Public License.

You may contact me, Robin Parmar, at robin.escalation at ACM.org. 

Please send code fixes and suggestions. I'm particularly interested in
any new Python snippets you may develop. 

-----
robin                                  robin.escalation at ACM.org
media artist / information architect   www.execulink.com/~robin/

"number coercion failed"