[Web-SIG] Just lost another one to Rails

[Ian Bicking]

Greg Wilson wrote:
> So my question is, has there been any movement in the wake of Michelle 
> Levesque's web-off, and all the press Rails has been getting, to do 
> something about this?

I've been hard at work on WSGIKit, mostly trying to create that 
out-of-the-box experience.  There's been some progress; when I finish 
the tutorial (http://svn.w4py.org/WSGIKit/trunk/docs/TodoTutorial.txt -- 
all doctested) I'm planning on making an announcement and a downloadable 
bundle, website, etc.

I've been meaning to talk it up some more here too.  I think the core of 
the setup -- server startup, filesystem setup, configuration -- is 
applicable to most frameworks.  So I'd like to include support for more 
frameworks.  My desire is that for most Python frameworks setup and 
installation would involve some package installation (an open but 
important issue -- maybe just distutils installs, or maybe something 
simpler), and then:

     app-setup create framework_name app_directory/
     cd app_directory
     wsgi-server

And you get a server; SimpleHTTPServer-based by default, but 
configurable through a configuration in app_directory/server.conf.  The 
app-setup stuff needs to delegate more to the application templates, but 
there's no magic there (though loading up pluggable modules is always a 
pain in Python).  Or you can do:

     wsgi-server --server=cgi > /var/www/cgi-bin/myapp.cgi

Or:

     wsgi-server --server=console --url=/ > sample_page.html

And all sorts of options are possible.

I've actually been changing my mind about what we as a community need to 
do (my last Rails post was me thinking through those ideas: 
http://blog.ianbicking.org/what-really-makes-rails-work.html ), and I 
feel that diversity isn't so bad if we can just make a compelling 
infrastructure experience, which I think WSGIKit's setup can provide in 
a relatively generic way.  Once we have that, it's just a matter of 
hawking our individual frameworks to the world (not so much each other) 
and seeing how things pan out.

And I'm certainly willing to change WSGIKit to accomodate more 
frameworks (and I'm also very open to giving people commit access to the 
project) -- I actually think WSGIKit will accomodate other frameworks 
well right now, but I'm just guessing until some more people try to do 
so.  (I also wouldn't mind changing the name of the project, which is a 
rather lame name right now, but that's another issue -- maybe just 
making it rebrandable would be fine too)

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org