On 10/25/05, Titus Brown  wrote:
> For many moons, the mems-exchange people have produced high-quality
> software with clean APIs: Quixote, SCGI, and Durus are the ones I
> know the most about.  They have done essentially no advertising for
> these applications, preferring a kind of stealth mode where they produce
> good software that *they* can use and leave the rest of us to figure it
> out.

They are maintaining something they need anyway, and incidentally
releasing it.  So marketing is a lower priority.  Similar to Debian
Linux, as opposed to Red Hat and SuSE.

> SCGI is gaining some? traction as a WSGI-capable server now.  It could
> easily be "marketed" as a clean alternative to FCGI.

I think it's gaining ground.

> Quixote (which consists of at least the Publisher interface,
> form/widgets library, and PTL) has always had a low but steady level of
> background "community" activity.  Personally I think this is because it
> just works for many people, but also because it's only accessible to a
> moderately educated set of Pythonistas.

I think Quixote has relatively few users.  Otherwise we'd see more
activity on the mailing list.  Part of it also is Quixote's
simplicity.  You can print out all the modules and understand them in
an hour.  The KISS principle.  That eliminates a lot of questions
right there.

> Durus is relatively invisible in the Python community, I feel, but it's
> known and some people are using it.

Durus is held back by its thread unsafety.  I'm not using threads now
but I don't want to lock myself out of a multithreaded WSGI server
later, for instance.  And multithreaded servers are the most common.
Yet I also don't want to convert my data and code from Durus to ZODB
when the time comes for threads, especially since the need may arise
with short notice.  (A compelling server or library; a need to serve
the application on Windows, etc).  That makes me think long and hard
about using Durus, even if I don't need ZODB's extra features.

>  * update the Quixote documentation, perhaps by making it into pure
>         reference docs (epydoc, anyone?),

I've become a big fan of Restructured Text.  If only it was stable
enough when we were writing the Cheetah documentation, we wouldn't
have had to use LaTeX.

--
Mike Orr  or