Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

Archive pour la catégorie ‘mod_python’

Web frameworks are too dang easy to write

I suffer a lot from the same problem. Looks like building [web,ORM,ETL] frameworks is an elaborate form of procrastination from doing the dirty, real-world stuff.

Of course, you feel much smarter when you are writing code to automatically generate SQL queries than writing them by hand, even if it takes twice or more time ! Because, you know, next time you won’t take as much time, thanks to your framework.

Except that the framework that you have guiltily written (all the while trying to perform the task you are paid for in the expected time frame) is not as general as it should be, and you have to spend some more time tweaking it to re-use it the next time.

Plus, suppose now that you don’t have time to maintain this application you made with your custom framework, so you have to teach another developer how to use it to fix a given bug. It would have taken him seconds to spot and change an ORDER BY TASK_PRIORITY ASC to ORDER BY TASK_PRIORITY DESC, had the SQL expression been written by hand instead of generated by your code, but nope, that won’t be as easy… Because how could you have taken time to document your framework, given that it was initially an undercover work ?

No, no, sometimes, dirty things must be done in a dirty way. Try it and you’ll see that actually writing the SQL code / HTML FORM fields management / ETL code is often more productive than loosing yourself in framework stuff. Granted, it’s not as interesting, but face it, not every piece of your work can be interesting. Remember the last time you had to re-install your boss’ PDA synchronisation software because « it no longer works ».

OTOH, when you try to behave yourself and separate the normal work from building the framework (telling yourself that you’ll keep the framework stuff as a side project), the framework is at risk to be too abstracted away from real-world considerations, and then you get EJBs…

You can fetch it from the usual source. This build theoretically solves two very annoying bugs that should have been solved long ago. Now, the mod_python publisher is really usable. It was not the case before, so I built my own, like Graham Dumpleton did ; however, I feel mod_python should have a proper built-in publisher module. Here it is, I hope !

You can download it here (MD5 is bbf67262782ee0207a1e2dd03cc769f2). The installer is smaller than the 3.1.4 version because I compressed it with UPX, reducing it from 131,299 bytes to 100,067 bytes. Eh, like we say in French, « Il n’y a pas de petites économies » (I have a very tiny hosting plan, so every byte saved counts!).

Warning: this is an unofficial release, I’m not even sure of the 3.2.0-dev version number yet (I have to check with the rest of the development team). We’ve added a bunch of unit test which pass, so theoretically nothing is broken… but I would not use this in production for now. However, your feedback will be greatly appreciated! Tell us how this build behaves on your test installation.

I’ve put a Win32 build of mod_python 3.1.4 for Python 2.4 here :

http://nicolas.lehuen.com/download/

Now, this comes without any warranty or anything… I’ve tested it and it works ; I’d welcome your +1s on this build. Hopefully, it will soon be uploaded to the Apache web site. My poor bandwidth limitation certainly won’t support many downloads…

The 3.1.4 version is a small bug-fix release designed to fix a single security flaw (which led to the discovery of a similar flaw in the XMLRPC server in Python, hence the 2.3.5 release). The mod_python development team (including me ) has been working on a few bug fixes and improvements for the next release. You can follow our progress and post your suggestions here.