launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Richard Harding <rick.harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Gary Poster wrote:

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

On the one hand I can understand, however I think one of the great
principles of this kind of work is the chance to produce a real prototype.
Any prototype should be trashed once complete. In this way you're
encouraged to perhaps go out on a limb more during this stage since you're
not going to be stuck with any decisions made except the UI interactions.
Secondly, you don't get attached to the code so you won't spend the time to
make it more robust and resilient since "it's going to turn into production
code".

> > 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.

I'd recommend Pyramid as well. I was working in it before I came aboard and
it's really solid, can be really light weight, and you can use many of the
same components. It's also very flexible, so you might find a lot of docs
and how-tos that don't fit. For instance, my work was using routes, mako
for templates.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions. I sprinted with them at
PyCon last year and the lead dev Chris is a great guy to work with. Lots of
help there if you need it.

-- 

Rick Harding

Launchpad Developer
https://launchpad.net/~rharding
@mitechie