Now, much of our project’s work is done in python, so the powers that be say “hey, write us a web app in python that does this job”. No prob, python has lots of web app frameworks (cherrypy, twisted, django, snakelets, mod_python (and .psp pages) ). And, it was actually a Good Thing, because I’d always wanted to learn web app programming (It’s embarassing, actually. My ivory-tower programming experience has been a lot of working with statistics, machine learning, natural language processing, but I’ve never done things like web programming, database programming, etc; I’ve read php and mod_perl code, but reading is of course much different from writing). So, mod_python and psp it was. They proved to be intuitive enough to get some working teach-myself-how-to-do-this stuff code in a couple hours.

However, project requirements change. “We want you to do it in Zope or Plone” became the new order of the day. Been wrestling learning zope/plone for the past 4 days or so… The architecture has a lot of promise, but in many ways it’s frustratingly immature. It can make things look really slick… but documentation is disappointingly unclear/convoluted. There are many links out there for learning this stuff, but very few good ones.

After much searching, dev shed ended up having a high concentration of good links. I wish I had found this howtoCreating Basic Zope Applications, in particular, 5 days ago.

Zope seems full of inconsistencies. And it’s not very pythonic. Take, for instance, a mishmash of “here”, “this”, and “self” used hodgepodge to fulfil the function of python’s “self”. What’s up with that?