Peter's Blog

Coding away with TurboGears and found that glorious nirvava where whatever I tried Just Worked. Kid, SQLObjects and cherrypy are nice and clean and turbogears has generated a nice boilerplate framework. Going through the code of the various librarys while debugging, there is magic in the way they are working but it is not causing me big troubles as the api's they present are nice and clean. Python is such a lovely language I always felt it would be great for web development and now it feels like I have the tools.

I commented previously on SQLObjects support for introspection and I was wrong here as the help command (possibly docstrings in general?) is broken and generates an exception but the online documents are fairly comprehensive.

I have a heavy cold and hence had one of those tortured nights sleep with recurring dreams. I kept seeing Kid's XML element tree sitting in memory, branches being swapped in and out and the resulting document changing in wonderful ways. It was not a bad dream. I woke up thinking it was a great way to manipulate a document compared to primitive string substitution. I have never really tried DOM models before, being reluctant to use all that memory, but now that memory is cheap I shouldn't be so cautious. Playing with SAX parsers is a pain, if I have to write another state machine I'll scream.

Another discovery, the TurboGears command `tg-admin shell` somehow picked up IPython and I was able to play with the database api whil admiring the pretty colours.

It was nice until I tried porting a theme from php and ran into an annoying works-in-ie-but-not-firefox problem. There are some things that even the nicest development environments cannot help with. I tried using html-kit to clean up the template code and it is indeed easy to preview kid templates in a browser, they Just Work.

Tip for the Day: although kid templates are xml it is better to tell WingIDE they are html as it avoids a limitation of the xml syntax highlighting where it treats Processing Instructions as errors and marks most of the file as a syntax error, making the editor run pretty sluggishly.