Thursday, December 08, 2005

OSDC 2005 - My WSGI talk

Due to lack of an Internet connection during the conference (my issue not OSDC's), I have not had a chance to post anything about the conference until now. On Monday 5 December I gave my talk on WSGI. Not really sure how it went across as no one asked any questions at the end or really talked to me about it during the rest of the conference. Of course maybe it was so good, everyone now fully understands WSGI, but that is very unlikely. Anyway the paper can be found here and the only photographic evidence of my talk can be seen here.

In the closing keynote "Tools for Freedom", Jeff Waugh made an interesting observation about how a user of our software doesn't really give a damm about the technical aspects, they just want it to make their life easier. That got me thinking about how to improve the uptake of WSGI. As much as TurboGears can use WSGI, most developers will just run the standard CherryPY server. Maybe when they start thinking about production deployment, then WSGI may be used as the "making life easier" solution. So for the next couple of months I hope to focus on making some existing python apps WSGI enabled so the users of these apps will find deployment easier. So during breaks in the conference, I wrote an adaptor to run Roundup as a WSGI app. Fixed the last of the problems on the plane to Sydney this morning and once I have fully tested it and tried it at work for one of our existing Roundup tracker sites, I will look at checking it in to the Roundup CVS.

Not sure, about the next Python app, any suggestions?

5 comments:

Ian Bicking said...

I think converting apps is a great idea. Especially for an app like Roundup, which is not particularly easy to install right now. MoinMoin is another app like that; any of the web applications with ad hoc frameworks are probably good targets. There's some interest in converting PyBlosxom, I think, and maybe Leonardo.

hexdump42 said...

Looks like MoinMoin has been done already :-)

http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/WsgiRequestPatch

Anonymous said...

Sorry I didn't say it directly to you, but I thought the WSGI talk was excellent and I had no questions mostly because the presentation left none for me to ask :)

I'd be interested to know what makes Roundup "not particularly easy to install" since that was a specific goal that I thought I'd achieved.

alang said...

Didn't get hear your talk, but I did read the paper. Like Richard says, it's very clear, seems to cover all the ground and I didn't feel the need to ask more questions. Congratulations!

Anonymous said...

i like your idea of paste-ifying roundup - have you made this code available anywhere? i'd be interested in taking it for a spin. thanks! bob