[Tutor] Web GUI for a network management tool

[Alan Gauld]

"Thanos Panousis" <pthanos at gmail.com> wrote

> The time has come to write some kind of gui for it, so that graphs,
> visualizations and configuration options are exposed to non
> developers. Do you think that a web app frame work like turbogears 
> is
> appropriate in my case?

Graphs etc on web apps can be problematic, but thats true of
all web apps regardless of framework. You may need to hunt
for some graphing code to suit the framework you choose
- or maybe a Java applet.

> Have you ever done anything like that, and how did you go about 
> doing
> it? Would web frameworks (turbogears, Ruby on rails, Java 
> frameworks)
> be any use to me in something like my case or I should just roll my
> own?

Any web framework will be better than roilling your own if you are
developing more than a few pages and particularly if you want to
keep clean separation between your model and the UI aspects.

There are a host of Python web frameworks, the most popular
nowadays seem to be Django and TurboGears. I favour TG myself
but to be honest they all offer much the same features:
- a templating language to link HTML and code
- A mapping mechanism from url to a python method
- an object-database mapper

HTH,


-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld