* Titus Brown wrote [2005-10-17 16:51:11 -0700]:

> -> Quixote will do its job and get out of your way, it won't tell you how
> -> to write your templates, connect to your databases or deploy into your
> -> production environment. Whether that's a good thing for you or for
> -> your customer is an open question.
> ->
> -> Just my two cents. I'm not an Official Quixote Cheerleader, and my
> -> opinions are no one's but mine. :-)
>
> I agree with pretty much everything you say ;).
>
> I think tutorials are important, especially for programming frameworks
> like Quixote, and I hope to add a chunk or two to mine in the next
> month.

I agree with both of you. I had a reply all lined up suggesting that, if
anything is missing on the "get going quickly" side, perhaps a simple
application skeleton generator would be one such thing. But then I thought
better. But here I am thinking about it again and will let this message
fly...

Perhaps there is still some minor but useful value in having a tool that
would spit out a nice file system hierarchy and a "run" script all tooled up
to fire up the basic app using simple_server, i.e. something like:


        site create "someapp"  ->

                .
                ..
                bin/
                        run
                doc/
                        README
                obj/
                        test/
                                utest_sampleobj.py
                        sampleobj.py
                ui/
                        test/
                                utest_sampleobj_ui.ptl
                        sampleobj.ptl
                        root.ptl - or call it qslash or whatever ;-)
                        home.ptl


The goal would be to give new users just a little more of a head start, not
make all their decisions for them, since unlike Django or Turbogears
communities, this one is nothing if not diverse in its application
approaches.

Personally I'd love to see something like this show up in dulcinea some day.
I build a little demonstration app last week and even though I have my own
template (with a bunch of durus or SQL stuff in it, depending on need), there
still are a bunch of little tweaks needed to get an application running. It'd
be rather cool to issue:

        % site create "someapp"
          Site "someapp" has been created. Execute someapp/bin/run to start.

and the result of that being a runnable albeit skinny application but at
least in a file hierarchy that makes some sense and gives some gentle
suggestions as to how to proceed.

If I'd my druthers, the above app would include Dulcinea-specific stuff too,
since its not a big step to add useful Dulcinea-isms:

                .
                ..
                bin/
                        create_db.py

                local.py
                local_ui.py

.... to the above hierarchy. The Dulcinea specific example would also create

        www/sites/someapp/...
        www/var/someapp
        www/logs/someapp


Or maybe I'll just stick to my quick and dirty scripts... :-)


I will say that giving a new never-seen-the-framework before user a leg up in
showing them how to structure an application beyond the demo-level of
complexity would be a good thing, whether from a pre-built app layout or from
tutorials or a script or whatever, to answer the odd "how do I structure an
app" sort of question... questions that sometimes don't get asked.