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

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

When I came to IronPort, I had to act as such a benevolent dictator,
or rather, a benevolent concensus builder.  I worked with Sam Rushing,
of Medusa fame; Paul Clegg who worked on ClearSilver; Eric Huss who
had his own templating language (what good Python programmer
doesn't!); my boss who was from the Struts world and who favored
Cheetah and WebWare; I had written Aquarium and enjoyed Mason.  We
chose Aquarium mainly because it was thread agnostic, and could be
easily run within a co-routine, stackless Python environment.  A lot
of changes were made to Aquarium to incorporate what the other guys
thought were key parts of the other frameworks.  We chose Cheetah
because it was stable, and because I personally don't like templating
engines that act like handcuffs.  Note, I'm not trying to force
Aquarium on *anybody*.  I wrote it because I needed it.  I open
sourced it because I like sharing.

My personal feeling is that having such a benevolent dictator would
probably be a bad thing.  Concensus is a good thing.  Perhaps the way
the IETF works is a good model.  There's a couple chairmen from
different companies who mostly sit back and watch as people fight it
out.  On the other hand, concensus in the IETF can take years. 
Furthermore, it does nothing to reduce duplicated code.  The IETF just
makes sure that different systems can play nicely with each other.

Is it just me or does the Python Web application framework world seem
about as obstinate a problem as the Palestinian mess? ;)

Happy Hacking :-D
-jj

On 4/29/05, Greg Wilson <gvwilson at cs.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> Hi JJ; thanks for your message.
> 
> > I have a lot of respect for Michelle, but she has a *long* way to
> > before she can say she's worked with most of the candidate systems.
> > There so *many* of them!
> > Best Regards,
> > -jj
> 
> It was just a name --- I notice no one has commented on me suggesting Ian
> Bicking (hi, Ian ;-), and I'm sure there are others.  I think it would be
> important to pick someone who isn't the author of any particular
> framework, though; maybe one of the creators of Trac?
> 
> Thanks,
> Greg
> 
> p.s. Trac's a perfect example of why I think we need to pick one framework
> (or one combination of tools, if you prefer) and put our effort into that.
> It's a classic MVC web app, but its deadline-driven authors decided they'd
> be better off "rolling their own" than using WebWare, CherryPy, Twisted,
> etc.  We'll know we've solved this problem when the *next* group to come
> along can get their app up and running in half the time, with half as many
> separate installs to coordinate.
> 


-- 
I have decided to switch to Gmail, but messages to my Yahoo account will
still get through.