Skip to main content

Nevow of the Future

I am not a core Nevow developer, but am only a developer who uses it. I do talk a lot with the developers, and try to keep up with what is going on there. So, I do know a bit about what is going on, and where things are supposed to go. I know that contexts (a type of object passed around that gives access to the current tag being rendered, remembers adapters between interfaces, and does other stuff that isn't so good) is supposed to go away, eventually, at some point, somehow. There is little talk of how, when, and that sort of solid thinking on the subject.

So, for the heck of it, I'll propose a plan of action, and this is it.

Step #1
Fork it, so that all the refactoring can be done and if anyone needs a backward compatible Nevow, it can still be around for them. There is already xmantissa and xquotient, so it wouldn't be a stretch to add xnevow. My other favorite is to just say that Athena is the new Nevow (see Step #2)

Step #2
Pull everything out of the fork that Athena doesn't need, so things can be focused. Refactor so that there is no difference between Page and LivePage, and you can just make any page become live. At this point, things can start to change and context can be factored out entirely. New flatteners would be needed, of course, but those should be more or less straight forward to adapt.

Step #3
Expand the templating system to be smart enough to handle both server- and client-side work. I recommend a nevow:insert directive that defines sub-templates to fill and insert the resulting node at some place, which could replace nevow:pattern and also carry over for used in live pages on the client. While we're at it, add in some good widgets to start with, like containers and tabs and such.

Step #4
Create a fake nevow module that can map existing API calls to the new stuff that would be in xnevow/athena. This would allow for easier transitions to the new system.

I might try and convince the usefulness of this to an employeer and see if some of my project time can be spent sprucing up athena in such a way, depending on just how much this would take to be really useful, or just usable. Then I could contribue something useful, and get some moneys.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more