web programming: experiences with non-zope frameworks?

[Harald Massa]

Brendan,

I just wanted to explain my experience using a rather special Web-
Toolkit.

It's not really a framework - even if Quixote http://www.quixote.ca/ is 
called that.

Quixote was created by employees of mems-exchange - as much as I 
understand a virtually connected collaboration of chip producing 
facilities (I'm not connected to them in any way besides using Quixote)

I had to do a mid-sized web project early this year, I fell in love with 
Python around November last year. This falling in love ... was after a 
quite long marriage with PHP. And I really thought PHP was a sexy thing 
when I started that relationship.

PHP was a really sexy thing, good for a great nightout and a good time.

But --- a marriage with a language asks more than being sexy from a 
language. Yeah, it was great, being a Web-Virgin to have the first time 
dynamic webcreation with PHP quickly. But I learned that that is not 
enough for a language to have a stable relationship.

So I thoroughly searched the various approches to Python Web Working - 
and got stuck with Quixote.

Why? It's really not suited for fancy webworking, flashing here and 
there. But my applications are rather "database interfaces" than flashing 
playgrounds.

And that's where Quixote excells - programming the web. The website as a 
programm - the URL as index into the Python namespace.

It was a tough learning, though. I just had started my relationship with 
Python, was just getting familiar with what is called "namespace" - and 
now that was the basis for webworking.

BUT... Quixote is very very elegant. I could read the entire source code 
in a matter of 2 to 3 hours. And after four weeks I integrated speedups 
and even was able to isolate bugs in mod_scgi - it's a great game, once 
you get used to it.

My application deals with "getting stuff from Office into a database and 
publishing that database contents to the web" 

In the end, only a very very small number of Python code lines - what 
makes ground for a stable marriage, 'cause supporting a small code base 
is WAY easier.

Harald