Christian Simms’s Weblog

Upgraded to latest version of rich text editor (fckeditor 2.6.3), so now it works in Safari.

There are a ton of half-finished or half-complete open source data modelling software projects out there. I’ve just been evaluating them for a client. At the moment, Power*Architect seems the best for my needs:

• open source
• multi-platform - Java in this case
• multi-database support - I need PostgreSQL and Oracle
• pdf export of ER diagram
• alive and not abandonware

And to top it off, it’s actually easy to use! Take that, ERwin. To be fair, it doesn’t have all the features of ERwin, but that’s OK for me.

Besides fixing some minor bugs, the YUI calendar popup is now used for date selection.

We’ve actually been doing consulting for a while, and now we’re formalizing it into two product areas:

• PyGuys - Python and open source based solution consulting
• PyCOE - Python Center of Excellence, we help you set up a process or organization inside your company to encourage adoption of Python

Let me summarize our recommendations for Python web frameworks:

• Pylons: for database-driven applications
• Plone (built on Zope3): for CMS (content management systems)
• Twisted: for multiple/custom network protocols or extremely high volume

Overall, the Python web community is seeing a lot of active development and evolution in solutions. Whereas the Ruby community has one go-to web framework (Ruby on Rails), the Python community has a plethora of choices. Luckily, a Python standard was created, PEP 333 aka WSGI (pronounced “whiskey” but stands for Web Server Gateway Interface), which provides a standard component architecture for Python web servers. All of the above frameworks support this standard now. This interface standard allows plug-and-play middleware.

We recommend Pylons for database-driven application development because internally it is built on WSGI. If TurboGears 2.0 development proceeds as designed and it is written on top of Pylons, then we will recommend it. Here are the middleware components that we recommend using with Pylons, and the features of each that we really love:

Database ORM: SQLAlchemy

• well designed: provides nice object interface to SQL tables, but also let’s you get to underlying SQL if you want to
• really efficient: can load entire graph of objects in one SQL query - e.g., load item and line item details in one round-trip to the database

Templating: Mako

• fast: it’s the fastest of the Python templating engines
• simple: you use standard Python in your templates, instead of custom tag libraries

Request Dispatching: Routes

• flexible: regular expressions with intelligent name binding to map tidy-looking urls to your internal object hierarchy

Form handling: ToscaWidgets

• no repetition: you model your form elements using Python objects, and use this model both for display and validation
• flexible: you can either use the default or specify your own template for html generation

Every category of middleware above has competition, but these are our current recommendations. Even though Pylons is a relatively new project, it is built on more mature components that are on at least their second major version.

A number of improvements have been made:

• when importing csv files, show a preview of the import before actually performing import
• speed up paging through results
• add keyboard shortcuts for moving through results: j is down, k is up, see keyboard shortcuts for details
• admins can click “admin edit” from view item page to override status workflow
• put word “Closed:” at the beginning of all closed statuses, these won’t show up on the dashboard
• when viewing part of an outline (a “hoisted” outline), new items should be added as child of viewed root
• reinstate duplicate checker on name fields when creating new items
• fix caching issues in IE while editing status workflows

Significant improvements were made to the web interface:

• We are now using Yahoo’s UI library. Our popup windows popup faster and are movable.
• A number of keyboard shortcuts were added.

Enjoy!

Some nice feature enhancements:

• added search - on the right hand side of all pages, you can type in one or more words which will be searched in all the data types. Matches are inserted at the top of the current page, so you don’t lose your context.
• project quickstart - if you click on the Welcome tab, you can run the Project Quickstart wizard and have a lot of your project data data be generated automatically — including automatic resource balancing, assuming fixed project resources.

Good old blogger Joel Spolsky just wrote a great overview of the state of web applications. I’m inclined to agree with his prediction, that we’re still in the midst of evolving the technology in web apps. On the desktop all apps have a consistent look and behavior but web apps have their own unique and different user interfaces. On the desktop you can copy and paste between apps, but not on the web except for a few words of text. I wonder how many years it will take for web apps to reach the level of design stability that desktop apps enjoy…

Fixed minor bugs:

• enhance account expired message
• additional created projects did not automatically get organization’s billing settings (causing spurious warning)
• fixed internal version string identification