launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 22, 2011, at 6:57 PM, Ian Booth wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> The Purple Assassins are working on the disclosure feature and a large
> part of that is the managing disclosure LEP
> (https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/ManagingDisclosure). Because this work
> involves the development of a fairly complex new UI, Matthew and his
> team tasked us with delivering an interactive mockup of the some of the
> core pages to allow exploratory testing with users. The users acting as
> guinea pigs were given various tasks to complete and it was observed
> whether the features they were testing were easily discoverable, what
> usability issues came up, could workflow be simplified etc.
> 
> The interactive demo was meant to be a quick prototype. We did it using
> static HTML and Javascript (with YUI). It's deployed simply by checking
> out the branch to p.c.com
> (http://people.canonical.com/~ianb/disclosure/manage_disclosure_index.html).
> All the Launchpad YUI widgets are available for use, and interactivity
> is achieved using Javascript to manipulate the DOM. There's no
> templating or app server running etc. The data model is implemented in
> Javascript and using the UI "saves" changes as expected but everything
> resets when the page is refreshed.
> 
> Despite fulfilling its purpose, there's some limitations we'd like to
> overcome. We see these sorts of demos being used more often moving
> forward so coming up with a preferred way of doing them will benefit us
> all. One of the biggest issues for us was the restriction to static
> HTML, and the lack of core technologies like tales that we use in
> production. It would be great to have a light weight app server / web
> framework available which would offer more of a chance to use these
> technologies and to hence produce prototype code more easily transformed
> to something suitable for use in production once the demo has served its
> purpose.
> 
> Something like Grok (http://grok.zope.org/) may be suitable. We'd have a
> slightly more complicated deployment process than simply checking out a
> branch to p.c.com. It may involve deploying to an ec2 instance for example.
> 
> So does anyone have any thoughts or input or past experience they'd like
> to share? My personal goals would be for:
> - lightweight
> - easily deployable
> - rapid development (duh!)
> - leverage as many technologies/frameworks/libraries as used in prod as
> possible
> - solution for some form of persistent data storage nice to have

Sounds like a good idea.

I'd recommend looking at Pyramid (http://www.pylonsproject.org/).  It is a lot lighter weight than Grok.  It has zope.component and zope.interface available if you need it, and can also use zcml and pt with extensions.  It's very well tested and documented (http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/docs/pyramid.html).  

http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/docs/pyramid_quick_tutorial.html might give you a feel.

Gary