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...