Re: [HACKERS] web-based front end development

Thomas - 
I'd suggest you have a look at the Zope system (www.zope.org). It's a
through-the-web development environment, designed for ease of partitioning 
the development and maintanence of web-based apps. 

One could think of it as a cross of Cold Fusion and PHP on steroids. It's
actively being developed in an Open Source way, with Digitial Creations,
Inc. as lead developers (only fair, it's their code they donated to
us all).

The partitioning allows you to write the SQL parts (as ZSQL methods),
and have someone else use them in a 'blackbox' fashion to design the
app. using DTML, the Zope HTML scripting language. It's relatively easy
to extend this to having 'content' people do just that, content. Not an
HTML tag in sight (for them).

At first glance, it may look a little heavyweight for 'simple' app., but
we all know that those simple apps grow, and you never get a chance to
rewrite from scratch untill you have too.

Now the bad news. The current beta has lots of nice new features,
but in the process of adding some of them (better concurrency, and
a new implementation of their transaction system), all the database
adaptors broke. They still work fine for the current stable, 1.10.2,
however. It's just that there are major features (ZClasses, XML support)
in the beta that could affect fundamental design decisions for any app
you'd start now.

I think it'd be a major win for both systems to have such a core member
of the PostgreSQL development using Zope. Give me 'till Monday and I'll see
if I can't get the ZPyGreSQLDA (ow, painful name!) working acceptably with
Zope 2.0. (I need it anyway, even if you don't go with Zope)

Ross
-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005