[FRPythoneers] My project: JOTWeb, A dynamic web application system.

[Sean Reifschneider]

I'm not much of a web developer, but I've got several projects that are
web-based.  Like the http://www.hackingsociety.org/ site, which I'd like
to be much more dynamic than it is.

I've spent quite a lot of time over the last year trying to use Zope and
other tools for the changes I wan to make on this site, but couldn't
really find anything that seemed like it would work for me.

Over the holiday weekend I spent quite a lot of time trying SkunkWeb.
In the end it just didn't feel natural to me once I got in very deep
with it.  It's got really nice object call caching, but doing anything
acquisition-like was pretty painful.  The developers are working on
making it less painful.

I went to bed that Sunday night thinking about what my ideal web
application system would look like.  On Monday I implemented it.  :-)

The system is using TAL (AKA Zope Page Templates) for the markup,
integrates with Apache using mod_python, and can call python code in
files in the file-system.  For example:

   Create a file "index.html":

      Current time: <b tal:content="utils/gettime">Time Placeholder</b>

   Create a file "utils.py":

      import time
      def gettime():
         return(time.strftime('%H:%M:%S'))

   The above results in the following HTML being sent to the client:

      Current time: <b>00:09:17</b>

At the moment, the base set of code is pretty stable, but the library of
tools needs work.  It's got a nice form processing and validation tool,
but I need to add things for handling cookies, sessions, sending
headers, etc...

I'd appreciate feedback on it, if anyone takes a look.  The site is at:

   http://jotweb.tummy.com/

Installation on Red Hat/KRUD 8.0 and 9 is pretty easy, just pick up a
couple of RPMs and instal mod_python (included with Red Hat/KRUD), do a
"service httpd restart" and you can look at http://127.0.0.1/jopt/ for
examples.

An example site that I'm working on right now, including session
tracking and form processing is at:

   http://dev.hackingsociety.org/

Feedback is welcome.

Sean
-- 
 If we don't survive, we don't do anything else.
                 -- John Sinclair
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin