[Twisted-web] Mantissa dead? => Nevow? => web? for person who doesnt want to use django

[exarkun at twistedmatrix.com]

On 07:39 pm, agasson at red-elvis.net wrote:
>
>On 14/12/2009, at 8:36 PM, Gas wrote:
>>Hi
>>
>>I muck around in twisted and am trying to setup a site for a club and 
>>would like to use twisted as much as possible because I like it. So 
>>saw stuff on Axiom and liked that then found mantissa only problem is 
>>nothing on web on how to get mantissa to work that actually works .. 
>>So I've lost a few hours trying to get it going with latest svn on 
>>python 2.5 (2.6 you get normal 2.5 code in 2.6 warnings (ie md5 etc) 
>>plus axiom/_pysqlite2.py needs to point to sqlite3 otherwise same 
>>errors) but keep getting the

I've just done some work to let Axiom use the stdlib sqlite3 module. 
This was put off for a long time because of some data-corrupting bugs in 
the version of sqlite3 in Python 2.5.

If someone wants to put together some patches to fix the md5 issue, I'm 
around to review them.
>>
>>File "/Users/gas/src/py/twisted/axiom- 
>>tests/Wiki/xmantissa/plugins/wikioff.py", line 3, in <module>
>>             from xmantissa import website, offering, provisioning
>>         exceptions.ImportError: cannot import name provisioning

I'm guess you tried to follow 
<http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/MantissaWikiTutorial>.  Quite some time 
ago, I added a warning to the top of that page indicating that the 
tutorial is broken.  So, don't look at it.

This leaves us with the question of what documentation you ''should'' 
look at.  This highlights a major problem with Mantissa - its near lack 
of documentation.  I don't think anything really exists to help a 
beginning get up to speed with things.

Sorry about that.
>>
>>So my questions are - being a twisted and web NOB seeing Divmod 
>>died/disbanded (I think  6 months ago?) and Mantissa doesnt look like 
>>its been touched for 2 years, and Nevow??? --- I'm not sure what is 
>>strategy if you want to develop a web app with twisted?

You will probably be able to find some assistance in #divmod on 
irc.freenode.net, as several people (myself included) with Mantissa 
experience still frequent that channel.  Additionally, Mantissa 
development is still underway, although at a very languid pace, so it's 
possible documentation will appear at some point.  The best way for this 
to happen is for more people to pitch in, though. ;)  Divmod may be 
gone, but Mantissa and the related libraries are and always have been 
open source projects - anyone is welcome to help, and such help is 
needed for the projects to survive.
>>Do I continue and try and work out the code for Mantissa (which I 
>>doubt Im capable of being a programming NOB), try to do it via Nevow 
>>or go back to JPs web in 60 second tutorial and work out a web 
>>application from there?

Whether the effort of learning Mantissa will ultimately be worthwhile or 
not depends on what kind of application you intend to develop.  It may 
be that Mantissa isn't even particularly applicable to your problem 
space, in which case looking at Twisted Web or Nevow directly would make 
more sense.  Or it could be exactly the other way around.  However, at 
the very least, Mantissa is quite heavily based on Nevow, so learning 
Nevow is going to be a benefit to you no matter way.  And once you have 
some Nevow familiarity, the learning curve for Mantissa might not look 
so steep.
>>Any pointers most appreciated
>>
>>Gas
>>
>>PS mucked around and got Combinator going which i liked however if you 
>>are developing a Mantissa app then combinator didnt work as you really 
>>needed too install mantissa and all its dependencies so you could get 
>>access to the axiomatic script or did I miss something? Is that the 
>>issue with Combinator that if python source installs scripts you still 
>>need to install the source in your site-packages? So is Combinator 
>>still valid or shall I look at things like bzr and use same Twisted 
>>development method ie of branches?

Combinator lets you skip the installation step.  I'm not sure if you 
figured that out or not.  Surprisingly, I'd say that the combinator 
tutorial (<http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/CombinatorTutorial>) is worth 
reading, if you haven't seen it already.  Otherwise, perhaps I've 
totally misunderstood your question. :)

Jean-Paul