[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 April 2005 17:53, Martijn Faassen wrote:
[snip]
> For what it's worth, I've also developed some schema and form frameworks. ;-) 
> I think the reason for the re-invention, also in the Web frameworks arena, is 
> that people look at the design decisions and think, "That's horrible! I don't 
> want to have to write that when doing that - why can't I just do this?" Not 
> that certain aspects of, for example, Schevo don't look highly intriguing.

Yes, I know that is the reason, it's why we keep reinventing wheels. And 
often we're right, it *could* be better, but:

* you could choose to help to improve the existing system

* you could stick with it anyway, dealing with the things that you don't 
like so much, as you're more efficient.

I know it *feels* more efficient and productive and fun to build 
something fun, but I doubt it's actually so in many cases.

And I'm just as guilty as everyone else. And I want my fun sometimes, 
and build new things.

Integrating software can be fun too, though. I've found that more 
recently I've spent way more time integrating existing systems than 
building new ones: Zope 3 into Zope 2: Five, libxml2 properly into 
Python: lxml, and recently my Clarity experiments to integrate 
ClearSilver templates into Zope 3.

Doing this integration work isn't particularly easy, but I can actually 
help make stuff other people seem to want to use too, as I'm not sitting 
alone in my little corner. This worked very well for Five and looks like 
it might work for lxml. Integration stuff is stuff too, after all.

Anyway, that's just a rant, and I know people on this list already know 
this. :)

[WebStack]

[snip]
> What I've sort of deduced from the discussions over the past few years is that 
> people may want interoperability, but they want the magic cloud of 
> interoperability to expose no API. WebStack gives you the possibility of 
> deployment on eight frameworks but exposes an API which isn't cool enough, or 
> something like that.

I looked at WebStack before, it looks cool and is impressive, but I 
didn't have any need to deploy on eight frameworks, and working with 
such an abstraction would make some things harder, as you want to use 
the native facilities of the framework.

WebStack abstracts away over a number of frameworks. This kind of stuff 
has worked for GUI toolkits, and you could say it works for HTML. It'd 
need some analysis to see whether this can work for web frameworks... 
Thinking "out loud". One reason portability for GUI toolkits is 
considered nice is because end users are using different OSes entirely, 
and you can't really change that easily. For web applications, you can 
more easily change what runs on the server, so that interoperability is 
less interesting, perhaps.

Another benefit of WebStack could be that you could write a component 
and potentially reuse it over many frameworks in many applications. 
Reuse is intensely interesting for developers, and if a standard API 
encourages reuse of some form, then that's helpful.

[snip]

> In my opinion, ClearSilver was one of the more under-rated template 
> technologies.

The data-driven concept is very intriguing; I sketched out some reasons 
in the weblog article.

>>More excitingly, recently there's been an absolutely great iniative by
>>others to integrate Zope 3 with Twisted using WSGI, and all kinds of
>>coolness may develop from that eventually.
>  
> I honestly hope that the guts of Zope 3 don't perpetuate the nastiness found 
> in Zope 2's HTTP objects.

I am not sure, but I think they were rewritten.

Regards,

Martijn