Web Framework Reviews

[Valentino Volonghi aka Dialtone]

istvan.albert at gmail.com <istvan.albert at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think you should take what you posted above and put it up on your
> main site, because right now there is no way to find any information
> like this.  Your entire intro is about templating and leaves one with
> no clues as to what else is there.

Right now there are at least 2 web sites: 
http://divmod.org/users/exarkun/nevow-api/   + file inevow.py in nevow.
http://divmod.org/users/mg/nevow-doc/

And a new one:
http://dictator.kieranholland.com/prose/Meet%20Stan.html

And the page I linked in my previous post:
http://nevowexamples.adytum.us/ 
this is a living site with the living examples distributed with nevow.
at least one example of formless does not work right now because of
changes that we are doing in trunk right now (only formless has some
problems, all the others work pretty well).

There are really a lot of examples, and you can learn a lot of stuff
from them. More documentation will be useful for sure, but by just
coming in the irc channel #twisted.web on freenode you would have
obtained all the answers you wanted to write a better review paper :).

> One remark regarding stan. For me it is inconceivable that one would
> build (and debug) any complicated webpage as stan does it, one element
> at a time:
> 
>  docFactory = loaders.stan(
>         t.html[t.head[t.title["Session example"]],
>             t.body[display_session]]
>     )
> 
> The pages that I have to build invariably contain multiple nested html
> tables etc. I shudder to think that I would ever have to build them
> like that. I know you have an "inverse" ZPT like templates those are a
> lot friendlier on the eyes. For someone who is does not know what Nevow
> is seeing an example of Stan is very scary  because IMO it does not
> scale at all. This again is just an opinion.

I have a little project, developed during my little free time that is
linked in my signature (weever). It has over 2000 lines of xhtml
templates and you can see a living example here:
http://vercingetorix.dyndns.org:20080/

I can guarantee you that when templates begin to be a bit too complex
stan is what saves the day. I usually use xhtml for everything (and
nevow has the best templating engine out there thanks to its flexibility
and simplicity, there are only 3 special tags and 3 attributes, and we
are working to make it even easier than that) but when xhtml gets
complicated stan is incredibly useful.

Anyway stan is also incredibly useful to write little examples without
requiring a new xhtml file (ok... you may use loaders.xmlstr but...)

And it does scale well anyway (Quotient is entirely built using stan and
it's very big).
Templating engines like ZPT prefer to put some code in the template,
Nevow prefers to put code in python and allow you to write some xhtml in
python too. python is easier to manage and less likely to be screwed by
any designer that doesn't know what python is.

> Thanks for the explanations. 

np :)

-- 
Valentino Volonghi aka Dialtone
Now Running MacOSX 10.4
Blog: http://vvolonghi.blogspot.com
http://weever.berlios.de