Python in the Mozilla world

[Eric S. Johansson]

Steve Howell wrote:
> --- "Eric S. Johansson" <esj at harvee.org> wrote:
> http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2007_04_28.shtml#e702
>> interesting.  Very interesting but I suspect the
>> message is "don't hold your 
>> breath but don't give up hope."
>>
> 
> Exactly. :)

This is one of those things where a foundation, with a smart person for making 
really simple things should get some money from the foundation and get it built. 
  I don't know about you but when I have a customer asking for a modification to 
an open source project, I respond much more quickly when they say "here's your 
budget".  Although sometimes the budget is so small, I'm tempted to find someone 
in Romania or other cheap locations and stretch my dollar as far as possible. 
I'm certainly tempted to do that on my own projects.

> Well, that sounds pretty reasonable, and I'm sure a
> lot of folks are in a similar quandary.  They need to
> use JS to a certain degree, but nobody wants to make a
> career out of plug-in writing, etc.  (I certainly
> don't!) It wouldn't surprise me that there are lots of
> Python programmers who do JS maybe 5% of the time, and
> many of those folks can't justify the effort to go a
> bit deeper on the learning curve, create more of a
> community, etc.
> 
> I guess I'm not helping you much other than to
> commiserate, but can I ask you to what extent you've
> looked into existing Python web frameworks, to see how
> much code there is out there that you could mine for
> your projects?  I stumbled on some pretty high quality
> Python code a few weeks ago that amounted to
> Javascript helpers, but now I can't find it for the
> life of me.  But it's out there...

actually, I've looked at some toolkits and they look really nice if I had a week 
to spend on them.  I'm trying to figure out how to fit something like these 
toolkits into my own framework (yes, another web framework.  This time, with 
accessibility in mind.  The motto is, learn in the morning, use in the 
afternoon, go home at night.)  But figuring out how to fit in Ajax type stuff
in the same way that the HTML has been simplified for 80% of the uses, requires 
a deeper knowledge of Ajax than I have.  And I'm unlikely to acquire in the near 
term unless I have a partner in crime to show me common idioms.

which is a pity because I have in mind a tool which could help writers for 
online comments.  Most of the current common techniques involve comments to a 
log entry or in some cases inter-line comments but the primary failing of these 
models is the ability to highlight just what the comment is about.  The user 
interface would be fairly simple.  Highlight the region and a text area appears 
below.  You enter text and hit submit or you can cancel.  A marker is left in 
the margins indicating the presence of a comment when you hit the marker, the 
text becomes visible again and the highlighted region becomes visible again. 
There are other refinements but that's fundamentally it.  I'll probably be 
motivated to jump into the JavaScript necessary after I finish and publish to 
other projects in Python.