[Twisted-web] twisted.web2+Cheetah+FormKit

[glyph at divmod.com]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:19:35 +0100, Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at cpushare.com> wrote:
>What do twisted-web readers think about FormKit as a replacement for
>formless? (Cheetah replaced the template rendering of nevow already)

It doesn't even qualify.  The essence of formless was a form generation library *for nevow* - I understand that's not what you want, but that is what a replacement would have to do.  Right now there are 2 main contenders for a replacement for formless - since FormKit is not integrated with Nevow, it's not one of them.

One is Matt Goodall's library, named "Nevow Forms" and confusingly just referred to as "forms" most of the time.  Another is the LiveForm Fragment/Widget combination which currently lives in Mantissa.  They're really serving different needs: MG's lib does sophisticated and customizable form generation, whereas LiveForm's form generation is incredibly simplistic - it's focused almost entirely on aggregating input and batching it up as sensible, typed input to Python functions in the context of athena widgets, submitting input when a button is pressed.  The user is expected to provide their own templates if they want a customized look.

Considering that "forms" seems the main contender to replace the generation portion of freeform, it'd be nice if there were some way to integrate it with LiveForm.  I don't think there is yet, but considering that you can plug an arbitrary docFactory into a LiveForm, maybe it will just work.

You're welcome to use FormKit, of course.  I don't think that using it under Twisted would be substantially different than under any other web server.

You could also just take over maintenance of formless - if you like it, why stop using it?  It's not going to break just because *we* don't think it's the best idea any more.

>The great bonus of the library model (...)

Yes yes.  We all understand you, since you've said this in six or seven other posts this week, often at great length.  You prefer code that does not have many dependencies and does not invert control.  There are drawbacks to the library model too.  Rather than debating this, do you think you could simply stop repeating it in every post you make?  While you're entitled to your opinions, repeating them so often is bordering on trolling.  I'm sure that some people on this list agree with you, but a large contingent on this list certainly *dis*agree with you, as evidenced by the frameworkish nature of Twisted/Nevow/Mantissa/web/web2.

By the way, those are the things that this list is supposed to be discussing, not Cheetah and FormKit.  There is a WebWare list for that stuff.

>I feel this time with twisted.web2 things will go well.

Since you have complained numerous times of API instability, and you complained about Atop even though you were vigorously warned off of it, I want to make sure the message is very clear here:

                  twisted.web2 HAS NO STABLE RELEASE YET!!!!!

You may well have to rewrite your application yet again when the code changes.  There is also no guarantee that the web2 team won't just move to a new module, say, "w3b", and obsolete web2 because they discover a radically better abstraction for dealing with HTTP.  The whole point of not having a stable release is that they're preserving that kind of freedom until they're comfortable enough with the code to commit to it.

It continues to baffle me that you have gotten so worked up about API stability and version changes, but as a solution to that problem, you are now rewriting all your code and moving to a less stable API.