I've many legacy applications developed in Zope and I want to evolve them to enterprise grade apps.
But I didn't find sufficient documentation to develop a "modern" app in Zope:
Authentication: how can I integrate Products.PluggableAuthService?
ORM: how can I use an ORM to abstract data model in my stack?
Application Architecture: may I build a Product for each Model or for each View? Or there is another way to organize the application?
Versioning and Deploy activity.
Where can I find documentation, samples and best practice to do my task?
The standard Zope documentation is old and incomplete to my scope.
First I would try to get an overview of the state of the applications. Which Zope version are they running on? Note that the widely spread version 2.13 (or even lower) is no longer maintained, see https://www.zope.dev/developer/roadmap.html
If you know what you have, you can estimate the effort to port them on a supported version, or whether it makes more sense to replace the applications.
how can I integrate Products.PluggableAuthService
The plugin has a pretty good documentation, see https://productspluggableauthservice.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - also have a look in the example plugins. If you have specific questions, I would suggest you to ask in the following forum - https://community.plone.org/
ORM: how can I use an ORM to abstract data model in my stack?
For Zope applications, you usually don't use an ORM. The model classes inherit from Persistent or similar.
Application Architecture: may I build a Product for each Model or for each View? Or there is another way to organize the application?
Usually, one product contains the model and the necessary views, but you can certainly also develop the applications in just one big folder. That depends on your preferences and how big the team of developers is.
Versioning and Deploy activity.
For versioning I just used git, as everybody nowadays.
For deployment, there is buildout, or pip with requirements.txt or ansible or what I used ... https://batou.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Where can I find documentation, samples and best practice to do my task?
You could look at Plone, as Plone is a pretty modern Zope application.
The standard Zope documentation is old and incomplete to my scope.
The Zope documentation partly has been updated for Zope 4. As a matter of fact, the documentation is just too extensive, the team of maintainers is pretty small, and "nobody" starts a new Zope project nowadays.
What actually happens - it gets updated now and then when work is done on e.g. a changing behavior, then also the documentation gets updated.
Try to work with the documentation, and when you notice something outdated, try to fix / update it, that is the way I learned to work with Zope.
Other than that - I think it is pretty awesome, that Zope is still alive, working, and security patched within days as it is already more than 20 years old and the number of maintainers is pretty small.
Related
I'm confused as why OpenTelemetry documentaion has OpenTelemetry Python API and OpenTelemetry Python SDK.
Like when using the specification in python when we should consider pip install opentelemetry-api over pip install opentelemetry-sdk
From the github pages of the implementation.
(note: could not fit this into a comment and did not want to just post a link alone)
This repository includes multiple installable packages. The
opentelemetry-api package includes abstract classes and no-op
implementations that comprise the OpenTelemetry API following the
OpenTelemetry specification. The opentelemetry-sdk package is the
reference implementation of the API.
Libraries that produce telemetry data should only depend on
opentelemetry-api, and defer the choice of the SDK to the application
developer. Applications may depend on opentelemetry-sdk or another
package that implements the API.
In simple terms imagine a plain python or JAVA interface. An interface by itself is just a contract saying what all things it can do. But you cannot use that in your code anywhere without implementing the interface first. So interfaces are just abstract contracts(API) which needs to be have concrete implementations(SDK). It is only then can you use the SDK.
Such strategies normally help with unifying the implementations of software libraries across industry under a consistent and constant contract. There are multiple vendors out there like Datadog, New Relic, DynaTrace, Signoz and more who can now implement their own SDK if needed but at the same time comply with a standard contract that everyone abides by. This allows you as application developers to not get coupled to any one vendor. But have the option to choose the best one among them and make the swap when necessary without breaking anything in your software system.
Hope this helps answering why application may only depend on SDK.
I need to write a very light database (sqlite is fine) app that will initially be run locally on a clients windows PC but could, should it ever be necessary, be upgraded to work over the public interwebs without a complete rewrite.
My end user is not very technically inclined and I'd like to keep things as simple as posible. To that end I really want to avoid having to install a local webserver, however "easy" that may seem to you or I. Django specifically warns not to use it's inbuilt webserver in production so my two options seem to be...
a) Use django's built in server anyway while the app is running locally on windows and, if it ever needs to be upgraded to work over the net just stick it behind apache on a linux box somewhere in the cloud.
b) Use a framework that has a more robust built in web server from the start.
My understanding is that the only two disadvantages of django's built in server are a lack of security testing (moot if running only locally) and it's single threaded nature (not likely to be a big deal either for a low/zero concurrency single user app running locally). Am I way off base?
If so, then can I get some other "full stack" framework recommendations please - I strongly prefer python but I'm open to PHP and ruby based solutions too if there's no clear python winner. I'm probably going to have to support this app for a decade or more so I'd rather not use anything too new or esoteric unless it's from developers with some serious pedigree.
Thanks for your advice :)
Roger
I find Django's admin very easy to use for non-technical clients. In fact, that is the major consideration for my using Django as of late. Once set up properly, non-technical people can very easily update information, which can reflected on the front end immediately.
The client feels empowered.
Use Django. It's very simple for you to get started. Also, they have the best documentation. Follow the step by step app creating tutorial. Django supports all the databases that exist. Also, the built in server is very simple to use for the development and production server. I would highly recommend Django.
I'm trying to build a desktop application using Python. To make it able to be used on as many platforms as possible, I think web UI may be a good choice. This boils down to the problem of making a local HTTP server first. I did some survey and found that people are mainly talking about BaseHTTPServer and SimpleHTTPServer. For prototyping, subclassing them may suffice.
Besides pure prototyping, I also want to leave some room for extension to real service. That is, once mature, I'd like to move the codes to a real dedicated HTTP server, so that end users only need a browser to use it.
I say "extensible" in the following sense:
The code modification is as minimum as possible in the migration process.
I will focus on algorithm in the prototyping stage. I also want to leave some room for future front end designer.
It looks WSGI + Django is a widely mentioned combination. After some search, what I found is using WSGI in apache or nginx. Is it possible to use self-contained modules? i.e. wsgiref + Django, so that I can start everything just from one entry script. I don't want to bother potential first adopters by asking them install apache and configure it. It will be very good if you have sample codes or pointers for further reading.
I'm new to Python and web programming in Python. Thanks for your help. I just try to make sure I'm on the right track. My underlying algorithms is implemented in Python 2.7. So the UI solution had better also be in Python 2.7.
I think what you may want is Bottle. It is a web framework that only needs the standard library to be installed. It also has compatibility with many other production servers, as well as shipping with it's own development server. And if that isn't good enough, it is all in a single file, and has support with many different templating languages, as well as it's own built in templating language.
Check it out here: http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/
As mentioned bottle is a good choice, I personally like Flask, which if I recall correctly is what bottle is based off of. Anyways there are three things that really make Flask a joy to use.
Blueprints - essentially an application architecture
Flask-Sijax - allows for comet technology
Celery - an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing
there are a lot of other plugins, including one for an admin interface that I haven't tried out yet but it looks promising, and it works with Python 2.7
I am planning to do a small web application that will be distributed as a single installable. I have plans to develop this application in either Python/Django or Ruby On Rails. (I am a Java/C++ programmer, hence both these languages are new to me).
My main concern is about the size and simplicity of final installable (say setup.exe). I want it to be small in size and also should be able to pack all required components in it.
Which one among Python/Django and Ruby On Rails is suitable for me?
I personally prefer Python/django. Size is small given u have necessary things installed.
With disk space at the current price, size shouldn't matter. Give both a try and figure out which will be easier for you to learn and maintain. Despite the fact that people believe that when you know one language, you know all, that's only true as long as you write code on the "hello world" level.
One option with Ruby on Rails is to go with a JRuby deployment which would allow you to pack it all into a single .war file. This would require the person deploying the web application to have a java web application server (Jetty is probably the smallest and easiest to bundle).
With Rails, you are generally going to have to install Ruby and any required ruby gems. The Ruby install is going to be machine specific- different for Windows/Linux. Everything else should be easily scripted. If you go with an Apache Passenger (mod_ruby) solution, you will need to get that installed as well.
In reality, I haven't run into many server applications with simple, compact installs.
I just used heroku to deploy a blog written in Rails, and it was a fantastically easy experience. If you're interested in simplicity, it's probably the most simple deploy I've ever experienced.
I don't think you can get them both. I'm sorry to say this but you have to choose which one is more important to you.
Django application is smaller in size because many things is already provided out of the box, but deployment is not as easy.
On the other hand, RoR apps deployment is easier (both Ruby MRI or JRuby) but the application's size is naturally larger given you have to install other gems and Ruby On Rails plugins.
If you are experienced with Java and concerned about deploying Django and Rails apps, I'd recommend you give JRuby a try. This will give you several benefits from a Java-perpective:
You can call Java-classes and components from your Ruby/Rails app
You can use a familiar IDE such as Netbeans
You can package and deploy our entire Rails app as a single WAR-file with all dependencies included
With the cheeseshop, any python application can be made installable with a single command. I'm a big fan of Django, but it will require you to hook into an external webserver, as the built in server is for development only. You might look for something that has a more robust builtin web server if you want something you can just plunk down and start running. Twisted might meet your needs, though there's a bit more of a learning curve on that. I'm not sure how other python or ruby apps stand up on this front.
Given that I know no web frameworks in Python and would like to keep it Very Simple at the moment (as I am Very Stupid), for what is a prototype of sketchy longevity, are there any streamlined, simple, "batteries-included" modules for this? (It is also too early in my Python career to evaluate frameworks, select one, and learn it.) I see a module named "Cookie," which could serve as a foundation, but nothing session-specific.
I'm familiar with the basic session concepts, having used them in classic ASP and gotten into the nuts-and-bolts of them in Perl, but I am not seeing a lot for Python. Beaker looks interesting, but then the documentation seems to require middleware with WSGI and I'm back to the frameworks problem.
I've found an old recipe on ActiveState for sessions, which could obviously use some buffing up. The information being held is not anything anyone would mind having been grabbed, so while I am normally quite security conscious, I would be willing to be a little bit more lax with this prototype.
Or is this a "roll-your-own" problem?
I will be using Python 2.6 on IIS 7.0.
I think the web2py (web framework) is easy enough for you. I think it is the simplest approach of making a website or webservice. It will be also easier, than to understand Cookie or the other modules of python related to web-things.
You can start a session, by just typing:
session.your_session_name = "blabla" # or whatever you want to store
To make a cookie, just look here.
In web2py you don't have to configure anything. Just download it and start web2py.py. (you must have python 2.6 < installed.) You can also find some examples and a web-slide.
The Python Cookie module does nothing more than to hold some values in a dictonary-like object, but I think you have to store it yourself on your harddisk.
CherryPy is worth looking into. Yes it is a framework, and yes it requires WSGI, but it is extremely lightweight compared to other more robust alternatives.
There is another question that was answered on SO that gives a brief example on how to manage sessions with CherryPy. As you can see it makes it very easy to get up and running quickly.
Lastly, here is a little document about setting up IIS for use with CherryPy.
WSGI is not a framework, nor does it require that you choose one -- it's THE standard way to run any Python web app framework on any Python-supporting web server, including a CGI one. If you have a WSGI application named app, and want to run it on CGI, see the docs and use wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(app), as the docs say.
So, you can perfectly well use Beaker via WSGI (on top of CGI) -- e.g., take the example in Beaker's docs and just add (the needed imports and) the run call above (using the wsgi_app object that example constructs, plus of course a session.save and as well needed as, again, the Beaker docs explain right afterwards).
Rich or heavy frameworks have their place but so do lightweight, flexible components like Beaker -- and WSGI middleware is a great way to leverage such components without requiring any "framework-y" arrangements, just good old WSGI (on top of CGI or anything else).
BTW, the best way to run WSGI on IIS might be isapi-wsgi (I can only say "might" because I have no IIS installation on which to test it;-). But as long as you code to WSGI (with any framework or with none at all), that will only be an optimization -- your application won't change (net of what handler's run or equivalent method you need to call;-) whether it's running on CGI, IIS via ISAPI, Google App Engine, or any other server-and-interface-thereto combination