I’ve always liked CherryPy. I thought its routing method was a very novel take on the application routing problem. But I never used it too much because it was too loosely coupled for my purposes at the time.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I hear about circuits.web, part of the circuits framework. Event driven, modeled after CherryPy, asynchronous, web-socket support, and loosely coupled — which I need this time.

I’ve spent the better part of three weeks working with circuits.web, and I can say it’s been a resounding disappointment.

First of all, documentation is non-existent. And when I say non-existent, I mean non-existent. The core circuits framework is poorly documented at best. The circuits.web component isn’t documented at all. The closest thing to documentation is a collection of asinine examples that have almost no merit for real life applications, if they even work at all.

Second, I can’t exactly tell if the project is still being worked on. When I first started, I naively looked at the dates on the recent commits to the whole circuits project. The circuits.web portion hasn’t been committed to since August. WebSockets were made a candidate recommendation in December. Nothing in circuit.web’s implementation needs to be changed? That makes me suspicious.

Lastly, the Component architecture seemed like a good idea, but it seems to be thrown together in no logical way. Case in point?

Components handle events. Controllers inherit from Components. Controllers can’t handle events. Or if they can, I couldn’t figure out a way. Who knows why — there’s no documentation.

I was trying to create an Authentication component for an admin controller. There are of course, no examples of this. The authentication examples — that is the ACL, HTTP Auth, and HTTP Auth using /etc/passwd — all use an authentication scheme that is site wide.

What I needed was a way to pick specific actions that would require authorization. I figured out a way by accident, and within 3 seconds found a way around it due to the “channel” member of the Controller.

The channel in circuits.web, I assume, specifies the routing for the dispatcher to find the object. So your Admin Controller object might have a channel of “/admin”. The problem I found, using a Component for forcing authentication, I could bypass the Auth Component by going to, “http://localhost/admin/“. Note the trailing slash.

Change the channel to “/admin/” or “admin” and get a 404 on all admin actions — but the auth component works.

And that’s where I’m at. I should have went with CherryPy on this project, but no, I guess I felt like being disappointed by Python web frameworks again.

I haven’t really had any down time at work lately, and when I get home, I barely have any energy to think about programming. So this site has kind of fallen to the wayside. But, I do have some work related things I can blather on about.

Django is still a pleasure to work with

I developed a site a little over a year ago using Django (1.2) and just completed some updates. Even after updating this code multiple times, it hasn’t become messy. For content oriented sites, Django rocks. Plain and simple. For things more complex, core Django would probably stand up. For the admin tool, I’m not so sure. I couldn’t see it being good in every situation — if you have to customize it too much, you might be better off writing your own admin interface.

I’ve been managing the database schema with South — which is probably one of the best programs I’ve ever used. Everything just works. I haven’t run in to an issue where an automatic update didn’t work, but then again, this site isn’t the most complicated site.

Lots of people don’t understand Pyramid

I have my own personal gripes with Pyramid. But over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of posts looking for help understanding the “new” aspects of Pyramid: namely, the repoze/traversal/zope portions of it. The typical response is: ignore the parts you don’t understand. So the Pyramid developers spent all this effort, all this time, to improve their framework, write documentation about how it’s better and how it’s different and how the complaints users have about it are unfounded, to say ignore key parts about it and to even go so far as to write a wrapper to make it more like the old framework.

Forget understanding the framework… I just don’t understand its developers.

Do framework developers not understand framework users?

I found this article a few weeks ago — a run down of a presentation by Russell Keith-Magee at Djangocon. My particular interest was in the following quote:

Microframeworks. How on earth can an april fools joke like Flask get actual traction? Turn into a popular framework? Django is lots and lots smaller than zope, but these new ones are even smaller. What is small? What is micro? Could we adopt some? Can we become more attractive? We should think about this.

It’s simple. Flask is better documented than 95.2187% of all the web frameworks available for Python. On the other hand, Django is documented better than 99% of all of them. When it comes to web programming, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. Django is > 6MB. Some people think that’s too big. Some people don’t like Django’s ORM and/or template system, and rather than spend effort changing it, would prefer to start with something that doesn’t force these things upon you.

Maybe instead of trying to figure out how it gained traction and how to apply “the marketing” of a project to your own, maybe try to figure out why users like it.

In conclusion, WTF?

Apparently, there is a pretty serious bug with Drupal 7.2. Also, a fix has been found and applied in SVN/CVS/Whatever. But, they are waiting for 7.3 I guess to roll out this fix?

The other day, I was inspired to make a quick and stupid HTML5 app. It’s a soundboard that plays clips from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TugslL45aXk

Angry Ibex Soundboard

I wanted to test out the HTML Audio element. It works best in Firefox, Opera, or Chrome. Oddly, Firefox doesn’t support MP3 format. I assume due to the posturing over codec licensing and such. All seem to support WAV format, although I don’t know why FLAC support is non-existent.

Anyway, enjoy I guess.