Finding Nevow

I know, I'm sorry. I couldn't resist the pun.

I'd really like to like Nevow. It feels like a really neat idea. There are lots of parts that simply feel like a good way to write code (some of these are not unique to Nevow, or are inherited from Twisted) - interfaces, stan, livepage, guard, renderers, etc.

But some bits of the whole package really bug me. Far out of proportion to their real importance, I'll freely admit, but enough to put me off every time I try to use it.

The lack of documentation is a pain. Things are getting better - in Nevow 0.4.1 there are some good basic documents in the package, but it still feels like diving into the examples and source, and experimenting is the only way of finding out what's going on. And that sucks. It's not unique to Nevow, but Nevow's structure makes it feel worse. Maybe that's the interface stuff - I suspect it is - but whatever the reason, I'm forever finding odd neat, magic tricks, to achieve things (I remember the moment when I finally found out that you can use ISession(context) to get at the session object) but with no clear feel for the general principle involved. (OK, the context implements the ISession interface, and I can look in the code to find out what other interfaces it implements, but what's the logic? The context isn't a session, so adaptation isn't being used in the sense I understand. Why not use context.session with a getattr hook? How does knowing I can get the session this way help me to deduce that I can get similar things like the request?) I can ask on the mailing list or on IRC - the Nevow community is very helpful - but there are only so many dumb newbie questions you can ask before you start being a pain, even in the most helpful group.

Also, there's a feeling that things aren't really stable yet. The examples supplied produce reams of deprecation warnings of one form or another. I know I can suppress them, but it feels like there's something wrong. Should I not be using Twisted 2.0 yet? Should I be getting Nevow from subversion rather than using the last release? Or is this OK, and I shouldn't worry?

And the guard stuff, while it's a neat way of doing authentication, really, really bugs me with its redirects to ?__session_just_started__=1 and other such things (I've seen a few variations). These internal details should not be visible to the user! What happens if I bookmark something like this by mistake, not noticing that it's not the URL I originally entered?

And the formatting (or lack of...) of the generated HTML is a pain, too. I know it makes no difference to the browser, and I can always run the output through something like HTML-tidy if I want a neatly formatted version, but I do use "View source" as a debugging tool. And I can't with Nevow.

I'm sorry - this isn't much more than a rant. I've brought these issues up on the twisted-web mailing list, but no-one seems particularly motivated to do anything about them. I can understand why, and I certainly don't want to make any of these things into some sort of crusade - particularly as I can't offer any fixes. But they put me off using Nevow, which I do think is a shame (for me - the developers aren't going to miss me :-))

I'll keep trying to like Nevow, but I can't see myself actually writing any real applications with it for a while yet...

Python web frameworks and Rails

There's been a lot of discussion on the Python web SIG recently, prompted by the good press that Rails for Ruby has been getting. I'm not entirely sure it's going anywhere specific - it's not at all clear that there is a problem to be "fixed". But it does make me think once again about web development in Python.

I'm not actually a web developer. More than that, I have no actual requirement to produce any sort of web application in my job. But we do have some web applications, which we developed using Oracle's HTML DB. So to some extent, my view on Python web development is prompted by the question "why did we end up using HTML DB rather than Python?" Before I can talk about that, I need to start with a basic explanation of what HTML DB is. It's a web development environment, shipped with the Oracle 10g database - it gives you a web-based interface, which makes it very easy to build simple CRUD (Create Report Update Delete) applications. The key points are

1. Rapid wizard-based development of CRUD applications
2. Decent look and feel (tabbed pages, graphical buttons, etc)
3. Lots of features to make sophisticated stuff "easy" as part of the initial application (built in search and pagination for reports, "are you sure?" prompts for deletes, things like that)

The nasty problems come once you have built your initial application, and are trying to maintain it. Like many wizard-style code generators, what you get from the wizard is complex and quite subtle, and you can get in a real mess when you try to modify it. And a lot of the slick features are produced by generating a lot of code, so when you try to add something similar without the benefit of the wizard, it's nigh-on impossible.

So every time we need to add a feature to the application, I feel that it's a maintenance nightmare, and we'd have been far better with a nice maintainable Python codebase. But I couldn't compete with the initial productivity of HTML DB (I was the Python advocate, a colleague built the HTML DB version).

So, the place I'd like to see more help for Python web developers is in the form of tutorial documentation and application templates. Something that looks nice (I don't have any design skills, and I suspect many Python developers are in the same boat). Displaying and updating a database table is pretty much the same regardless of the details of the table columns, so a generic CRUD application shouldn't be impossible.

I'm not too hung up on which framework I use - I'd like to see this sort of thing in any of them. Combinations I've tried to use have included

• Twisted + Nevow
• Quixote
• CherryPy

For the database layer, SQLObject seems to be the most common choice, although non-SQL formats such as Durus aren't completely implausible. For my need, I'd want to store data in an Oracle database, and as SQLObject doesn't support Oracle at the moment, I'd be comfortable with a "raw" DB-API database layer.

So that's my impression - Python has lots of good things to offer in terms of maintainability and flexibility, but we lose on the "quick start" front. People want something "right now", and they don't seem to mind sacrificing longer-term maintainability for it. That almost certainly isn't true for "real" web developments, but in my environment, the quick intranet hack is king. For better or worse :-(

And that's where I see Ruby on Rails getting the attention - the 10-minute demo videos, showing how you can build an application from nothing in no time at all. So what if it's only a toy? It works, and it's a basis. Maybe Ian Bicking's Paste is going in that direction - I don't know, I've not looked closely at it yet. I can't get comfortable with the application generator style which Rails uses, and Paste seems to have picked up on. But that could start a whole new post, and I don't know Paste well enough yet to comment on it.