Welcome to JOTWeb

News

A common measure of performance for web systems is how well they stand up to being Slashdotted. See the news section for information on how a JOTWeb2 site handled being Slashdotted and came through with flying colors.

Note that the site menu (above) includes links to the "News" and "Changelog" pages, which will give you more information about current happenings in the JOTWeb world.

JOTWeb Benefits

The following are some of best reasons for using JOTWeb:

• Separation of presentation and logic.
• Strives to be simple and obvious for a Python programmer.
• Builds off existing technologies.
• Good documentation.
• Extremely fast and easy to use page caching.

More details on the benefits listed above are provided in the Benefits setion of the JOTWeb Introduction.

Introduction

JOTWeb is a system for developing dynamic web applications using HTML and TAL/TALES/METAL for templating and Python for the programming. It integrates with the Apache web server using mod_python. It's goals are:

• Simple for a Python programmer to use.
• The programming is in Python and the presentation is in HTML and TAL. Python is in .py files, presentation is in .html files, and referencing between them is easy. Much better for maintenance, in my experience.
• Cascading of objects allows sub-directories to easily inherit the look and feel of parents, while overriding directory-local parts.
• All JOTWeb related data is stored in the file-system. Use familiar tools such as CVS and your favorite editor.
• Good documentation. So far I've spent roughly equal amounts of time documenting and coding.

Why Another WebApp

The short answer is that I couldn't really find another web application system that I felt comfortable with. They were either too heavy-weight, didn't work as I expected them or didn't fit my development model, were not well enough documented, etc...

Because of my inability to find a web application system using Python that I could feel comfortable with, despite looking for at least the last year, I started thinking about what my ideal system would look like. JOTWeb is the implementation of the results of that.

Sites That Use JOTWeb

• The tummy.com, ltd., Linux Consulting. (Slashdotted) One of the more extensive JOTWeb2 sites including thousands of dynamic pages, and journal entries which are pulled directly from the database.
• Worryfree Linux Hosting. Dynamic site including customer login site and form processing.
• Know Your College. Helping students and others experience life at a particular college with a collection of other students' day-to-day experiences.
• The Hacking Society Development Site. Includes session management and form handling. This site is where development on the next generation of the Hacking Society Website is happening.
• My On-line Journal. This site is a simple BLOG that I implemented using a database to store the entries and using a secure remote publishing mechanism for uploading the entry and associated pictures. The site as it is now took less than 2 hours to build from scratch, including the CSS, database schema, and pages. The remote upload app took about another hour.
• This site.

Getting Started

Don't know what TAL is? It's also called "ZPT" and is the next generation templating system used by Zope. To get a feel for how it works, see the Zope Page Templates Front Page

The documentation is a good place to start for getting a feel for the current status. There is an Examples link at the top of this page which shows some samples including source code and rendered output. There is also an "examples" directory in the source, which can be of use.

There's also a "GettingStarted" file in the source which goes into more detail on where to start.

Requirements

• Zope 3 page templates. Both a tar file and RPMs are available in the FTP directory for JOTWeb2. If you already have Zope 3 installed, you will not need this.
• Python version 2.3 or later.
• mod_python version 3.0.1 or later.
• Apache.

Fedora Core 3 ships with a suitable mod_python and Python, and there are RPMs available for JOTWeb and Z3PT at the JOTWeb FTP site (link at top of page).

Debian Stable requires installing of the Python 2.3 packages and getting apache2 packages from the backports.org repository.

Debian Unstable should work just fine, but you will have to use apache2 for JOTWeb, not the "apache" (version 1.3) packages.

Installing

Red Hat users should be able to download the SimpleTAL and jotweb RPMs in the "Download" link at the top of the page. You will need to have mod_python installed, which comes with Red Hat Linux. JOTWeb is developed under a Red Hat variant called KRUD version 9, but this site is currently running on a KRUD 8.0 system. Either of those should be safe choices for trying it out.

Debian users will currently have to install both SimpleTAL and JOTWeb from source without using packages. Both these packages can be installed using Python's "distutils", simply ensure that "python2.2-dev" is installed and run "python2.2 setup.py install" from the root directory of the untared package to install. I hope to get both these packages added to Debian Testing in a few weeks.

Debian users may need to have Apache version 2 installed with mod_python. A Debian user has promised me more information on what specifically he had to do to get it working, but you may run into problems with the Apache 1.3 and associated mod_python available in Debian.