[Twisted-web] Re: Thoughts on documentation, wading into Twisted, Nevow, etc.

Nicola Larosa nico at tekNico.net
Mon Jul 3 03:07:05 CDT 2006


>> How was it that Twisted (or just Nevow?) managed to lose the 
>> attentions of Kieran Holland? He (she?) was clearly into Nevow, put a
>> lot of effort into understanding things, and yet headed off to Django,
>> which, reading between the lines, he/she didn't really think was even
>> nearly up to the Twisted/Nevow standard.  That's a bad loss. People
>> who can read and write code and who are willing to spend serious
>> amounts of time helping ease others into projects are so valuable. The
>> Addendum of Kieran's Stan page 
>> (http://www.kieranholland.com/code/documentation/nevow-stan/) seems to
>>  spell things out pretty clearly. It feels like the Nevow (and
>> broader?) community has done itself a serious disservice in losing
>> Kieran's attention (but, see above comments on whether this is
>> perceived as a problem, trajectories, etc).

> I don't know the answer to this question.  I am somewhat curious myself.

I remember reading that Addendum, and feeling a sad loss too. At the time I
did not follow his advice to check out Django, and now that I did, I regret
not having done so earlier: I now prefer Django to Nevow, too.


Django developers are very careful in organizing the documentation and
keeping it current. They also put much effort in being responsive to the
community at large. Granted, they probably are less overstretched than the
Twisted ones. :-)


Furthermore, it seems to me that the Twisted developers are bent on power
and versatility, sometimes at the expense of simplicity and clarity. The
Django ones have opposite priorities.

Two Nevow-related examples:

1) the URL resolution mechanism in Nevow is very general and powerful, but
makes it hard to see all the URLs in a site, and how they are handled.

The regular expressions used in Django are less general and rather ugly,
but do the job and make it very easy to see all the handled URLs at a glance.

2) the XHTML templating in Nevow (and Kid, and ZPT, and STL) is uselessly
convoluted. The template validability is a red herring, and makes writing
and reading presentation logic needlessly complicated.

The Django templating is again rather ugly, but definitely clearer, without
having a *too* powerful logic. At the same time it has the same power of
Nevow's fragments and slots.


To clarify, I've been using Twisted on the job for three years now, I just
got a new job on that basis mainly (so thanks once again, guys :-) ), and
am the current Twisted website maintainer, so I'm heavily invested in Twisted.

Now I have the problem of a better integration between Twisted and Django,
but it's a solvable problem. ;-)


-- 
Nicola Larosa - http://www.tekNico.net/

We all write shitty software. But only the best developers realize
they're doing it. It'd be ironic if it wasn't so depressing.
 -- Jeff Atwood, March 2006




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