Hi -

I am starting a quest with Quixote to develop a web front end for my
all-Python transformer diagnostics product. Earlier this year I
prototyped the front-end using Zope and found that to preserve my
sanity I had to use very minimal stub DTML documents which simply
called external methods to get their Python-generated content.
Quixote's content-generation machinery is more elegant than mine, and
with its Publisher, session management, etc., I am hoping to be able
to dispense with Zope altogether.

Like Joel Shprentz, I am very interested in finding a sensible way to
integrate database access with a Quixote-based application. My
customers have IT departments who insist on using Oracle and SQL
Server, so I am using mxODBC for all the database stuff.

I installed Quixote and a freshly-downloaded copy of Medusa on my
Windows XP system (with Python 2.2.2) and, after starting the Quixote
Medusa-based server, was unable to guess the correct URI for viewing
the demo pages. Log entries indicate that most of the 25 or so URI's
that I tried were processed by the Quixote machinery and ended up
triggering a TraversalError (invalid literal for int()) on line 19 of
integer_ui.py.

Question: What should the URI be for running the demo with the
Medusa server?  (I tried things like "http://cygnus/",
"http://cygnus/Quixote/demo", etc., where "cygnus" is the hostname of
my PC, and the server is configured to listen on cygnus port 80 and is
definitely doing so).

After that experiment, I downloaded and installed the Xitami web
server (www.xitami.com), cobbled up a CGI driver script 'qdemo' for
the Quixote demo, and was immediately successful in running the demo.
The driver script is simply a literal copy of the simple one suggested
in the demo documentation.

When I pointed the browser to "http://cygnus/cgi-bin/qdemo/", the
links on the demo home page worked properly. When I pointed the
browser to "http://cygnus/cgi-bin/qdemo" (no trailing slash), the home
page links were dead. For example, the 'simple' link evidently tried
to activate "http://cygnus/cgi-bin/simple", which of course failed. If
I typed in the URI "http://cygnus/cgi-bin/qdemo/simple", I got the
"simple" page as expected.

It seems to me that if "_q_index", "simple", "error", "widgets", and
"form_demo" are all in the "demo" namespace, which is like having
.html files all in the same directory, then relative references such
as those in _q_index() should always work, regardless of whether the web
server is configured to do "magical" URI renaming (sly dig) to conceal
the "cgi-bin/qdemo" reference in the URI's.

Jim Dukarm
DELTA-X RESEARCH
Victoria BC Canada