JOTWeb News Stories
Also available as RSS: XMLTue Dec 21, 2004 12:51: JOTWeb2 Easily Fends Off a Slashdotting
Author: Sean ReifschneiderOne of the common measures of performance for web systems is how well they can handle being Slashdotted. For those of you living under a rock, /. (slashdot) is a geek news site. Having a story link to a site will often bring a site down because so much traffic starts flowing at it. This morning, the tummy.com Blogs were slashdotted. In our new site, every page is dynamic, largely because of the menu on the left side, but also because of other elements. Our Blogs are probably the largest set of dynamic pages, where the data for those pages are stored in a database and all pages under that section are dynamically generated from the database. These were exactly the pages that were hit, and therefore you'd expect there would be problems. Typically, sites that get /.ed and have pages that touch a database will quickly start generating errors due to too many database connections, etc. So how did we get by with under 5% CPU utilization? The big secret is in site design and making use of JOTWeb2's "urlonlycache". While every page on our site is dynamically generated, that is mostly to deal with the navigation bar, and to render the journal pages. The pages don't vary from user to user, unless an update to the backend site design or Blog database is made. 99% of the pages are static in this way. A few other pages either deal with form processing, or have random user testominials that come up. One common way to deal with this is to have some source files, and render the final pages from the source using a big "make" system or similar. Something that runs the dynamic code on the pages and saves them to the final location for static vieweing by the web-server. Any truely dynamic content would stay in the final pages and would get run on the page view. With the "urlonlycache" in JOTWeb2, you can kind of get the best of both worlds. You can design pages as if they were rendered on every view, but specify a lifetime for the pages to be cached. The intermediate rendering to static pages step happens automatically. Better, pages that are dynamically generated but need to be freshened from time to time typically would have to be fully dynamic pages in a "make down to static HTML" scheme. In the tummy.com site, I set them to be cached for just a few seconds, so if they get hammered they still get the benefits of caching, but they also freshen the pages regularly. In our system, I have set most pages to be cached for a full day. This includes the journal pages. The pages with random quotes are set to be cached for 15 seconds, and the form pages are set to "0" (do not cache). You'd think that this would cause our journals and other changes to be updated only once a day. However, with the "urlonlycache" you can flush the cache for the whole site. There are two ways we update the site. Either through the journal updates, or by updating the pages or code on disc. I've set up both of those mechanisms to, when completed, flush the cache. So, when we post a new Blog entry or update a page, the changes are made immediately. The rest of the time, a page only has to be rendered once a day. Obviously, this number could be pushed up even further... I've also done some testing of dynamic page renders versus cached page renders versus static HTML pages (bypassing JOTWeb2 entirely). This testing was done by running "time wget -O /dev/null $URL". A full dynamic page render, coming from the database, takes between 120ms and 240ms. At that speed, we probably could have handled the slashdotting, as long as the database didn't run out of connections. A page wget of a "urlonlycache"d page takes between 9 and 10ms. That's a pretty dramatic speed increase (120ms down to 10, worst case). For comparison, a wget of a static page (bypassing JOTWeb2) takes 8ms. So, the overhead of using JOTWeb2 with cached pages is 25% or less. I'm pretty happy with those numbers.
Sun Dec 05, 2004 13:45: JOTWeb2 1.09 released, memcached fix.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've just released version 1.09 of JOTWeb2. It includes a change to the memcached code which is not backwards compatible. The MemcachedPath must now include the site name as the first element of the array. This is done to prevent the same URI on different sites that use the same cache from conflicting. Memcached is working great, I enabled it for all the non-form pages on one of my new sites, and it's just blazing.
Sun Nov 28, 2004 20:20: Performance with memcached
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've just converted the tummy.com journals pages to use the memcache support in JOTWeb2 1.07. The performance increases were pretty dramatic. this comes after the addition of some index pages which were fairly expensive database queries. The web server in question is a pretty speedy box, a 2.8Ghz P4, but the page deliveries were taking between 250 and 500ms on average to do. After enabling memcached, page deliveries (by that, I mean the "real time" results from "time wget" on the URL) dropped to around 15 to 20ms. In other words, a speed increase of nearly 17 times in the best case and around 25 times in the worst case. For comparison, a static page on this server takes between 8 and 10ms to be delivered. This is decidedly not bad.
Mon Oct 25, 2004 16:08: Bug-fix and using XML.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've released JOTWeb2 1.05, which includes a pretty significant bug-fix. 1.04 and below weren't returning the right value to Apache, so while they were rending content correctly, Apache was reporting a 500 result (internal server error). I didn't notice this until I set up monitoring of a JOTWeb2 site, and it wasn't happy about the 500 response. I've also been trying to get XML rendering to work. I found that I have to add the TAL name-space to get it to correctly deal with TAL. For example:
<?xml version="1.0" ?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:tal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/tal"> [...]Once I added this, things were happy.
Sun Sep 19, 2004 03:50: JOTWeb2 1.04 Released
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've done a lot of work with (as opposed to on) JOTWeb2 over the last few weeks. It's working great. The Hacking Society site is entirely running under JOTWeb with the basic set of code I've been wanting to allow users to enter their own entries. I also created a simple journal/blog system for tummy.com's new web site as well, and today efm and I did a sprint on the new tummy web site. One big change is that the virtualURIMapper and even the 404 handler can raise the redirect exceptions to point the browser at another page. I used this to make it so that references to one directory of our site get redirected over to another directory, preserving the trailing parts of the URL. Pretty slick and very easy. Many changes have been made to SimpleForm. I added some form elements that allow "fix your form errors" form redisplays to preserve SELECT and CHECKBOX type input fields. I've used this to pretty much fully implement our ordering page including validation, error display, and more. I combined this with some fancy TAL coding and templates so that our ordering pages are fairly simple and combine the functionality of form display, error checking and correction, and final form processing. Finally, I've added some code to allow control of the headers which control the cache lifetime of pages. My plan is to put squid in front of sites which are likely to have high traffic, and setting the cache lifetime is required for that. I'm very happy with where JOTWeb2 is right now. I'm making some small changes as I run into problems, but I'm mostly concentrating on doing sites right now.
Sat Sep 04, 2004 19:19: JOTWeb2 Looking Really Good
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've been working a bit with JOTWeb2, and I'm really happy with how it's looking. In particular, one of the things that really had me blocked version 1 was how to get it to handle virtual directories. By this, I mean directories who's contents don't exist on the filesystem. For example, imagine a system where "/users/<username>" was a user's home page, but you wanted to serve those out of a database instead of having to create the directories on the file-system. I've just implemented a simple journal/weblog thing for our new web-site and the mechanism for doing this is working really well. We've converted our "development" web site over to JOTWeb2, and it's working brilliantly. Because it's working so well, and my time is so limited, I'm going to put JOTWeb2 into stable mode for the rest of the year. I consider JOTWeb version 1 to be deprecated in favor of JOTWeb2. I will only be making changes to JOTWeb2 to fix bugs or add features required by my immediate web development projects. The SimpleSession, or perhaps a wrapper for the mod_python Session classes will probably come to JOTWeb over the next quarter. I will probably be needing them for at least one of my projects. SimpleSession should be easy enough to port, but I'm not sure I like it. It seems fragile in some locations, and I haven't used it enough to be comfortable with it. I'll be playing that by ear. The Zope3 TAL code is working great. Unlike SimpleTAL, Z3PT is producing errors which provide a line and column number in the file where the problem is, as well as good diagnostics on what the problem was. Hunting down hanging tags is a thing of the past. Finally, there is still a bug in mod_python related to importing. The JOTWeb2 architecture lends itself more to imorting all the modules you need right up front. Or, at least, if you don't it's easy enough to do so when you run into the mod_python import problem. There's a FAQ entry about this. I've provided extensive information to the mod_python folks, and even taking a bit of a look at it myself. I wasn't able to track down the problem, but I believe I've provided enough information on the problem and examples to reproduce it so that the mod_python team can resolve it. Otherwise, mod_python is working fine.
Sat Aug 28, 2004 18:22: JOTWeb2 1.00 Released
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI'm just in the process of releasing the first JOTWeb2 full release. I've made a couple of initial releases of the SVN version, as mentioned on the mailing list. However, I've spent much of the day today working on documentation and packaging issues, and the 1.00 release of JOTWeb2 is ready for others to try. Give it a shot and let me know what you think. Unfortunately, it'll almost certainly require that you upgrade your Python. If you're on Fedora Core 2, this shouldn't be a big deal. If you are on an older Fedora/Red Hat release, see the documentation on the http://jotweb.tummy.com/ site, it includes instructions. Debian Stable is probably going to be a World of Pain, but Sid is probably not too bad. The big thing is that you need Python 2.3.4 (required by Zope 3's Page Templates).
Fri Aug 06, 2004 02:32: JOTWeb Abandoned, Long Live JOTWeb2
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've decided to abandon JOTWeb. There are a number of reasons for this, including serious but subtle problems with mod_python, and code complexity related to integrating my code into Zope 3's TAL. I'm not sure that I won't continue to run into the mod_python problems, but the new design is quite a lot simpler to deal with. The big change is that there is no longer a search path to find templates or code. The code namespace is set up in a "sitecode.py" file, and that file must take care of importing any other sub-namespaces that it requires. Code can be broken up into bite-sized chunks this way. Templates are also all imported beforehand, and are stored in their own directory structure. While this does drop a very powerful mechanism in JOTWeb, the way in which it searched to find code and templates similarly in feel to inheritance, this seems to stress mod_python less. This also doesn't interact as heavily with Zope 3 code, producing something much easier to maintain. Unfortunately, at the moment I just have to have a working tool. SimpleTAL JOTWeb had problems with multiple execution of code, thanks to SimpleTAL. The z3pt conversion resolved this problem, but I was stalled because of the complexity and flakiness of certain imports with mod_python. I now have a tool which I'm confident I can implement our own web-site in, with enough features to make it easy, a comfortable Python environment, but simple enough that it's working. I'll be releasing what I have shortly. The down side is that existing sites will not at all work with JOTWeb2 without a conversion. The more external code and templates in the site, the harder the conversion is going to be. The current JOTWeb1 will remain available for existing sites use.
Sun Jul 25, 2004 21:04: 1.29 Test Release, mod_python works for examples
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've just released version 1.29. This version works with the base examples included with JOTWeb. I'm considering this a test release, because I'm sure there are some things that are having issues. In particular, things related to code getting/setting globals probably aren't working. So, don't plan to run this in production, but it's fairly close now. Also, it needs Python 2.3.4 because of the Zope 3 TAL code. You can find RPMs for 2.3.4 from python.org, and Zope 3 and mod_python RPMs from the JOTWeb download site. See the Zope3-TAL and RPMS directories. Please give it a shot and let me know if you run into any problems.
Sun Jul 25, 2004 02:08: Current SVN release works with Zope 3 TAL
Author: Sean ReifschneiderThe current SVN snapshot is passing all the tests against Zope 3's TAL engine. It does require Python 2.3.4, though. This is because Zope 3's TAL requires 2.3.4. This is going to be kind of painful because it will require building a mod_python which uses 2.3.4. Luckily, I have one of those built, and I'll provide RPMs of that once I've got the mod_python code tested. The gental code seems to be working fine though. So, if you want to test it out, you will need to get the SVN release from the "devel" sub-directory, and the Zope 3 TAL code from the Zope3-TAL sub-directory of the JOTWeb FTP site (download link in the link bar at the top of the page). You'll also need Python 2.3.4, from python.org. Let me know if there are any problems.
Sat Jul 24, 2004 16:45: Zope 3 TAL and SimpleTAL, plus SVN
Author: Sean ReifschneiderLots of new news. First of all, Fred Drake has sent me a copy of the Zope 3 TAL code packaged by "zpkg". It doesn't build into an RPM directly, because of problems with Distutils (which I've reported), but I have built RPMs of them for both Python 2.2 and Python 2.3. You can find them in the "Zope3-TAL" directory on the FTP site. I'll be using these for my development. Also, the latest releases of SimpleTAL just don't work with JOTWeb. I haven't looked at this at all, but I'd rather spend the time working on the Zope 3 TAL conversion than SimpleTAL, because of the problems with SimpleTAL. So, please use older releases of SimpleTAL with JOTWeb, there are RPMs on the download site for versions that work. Finally, I've re-installed the the jotweb development server, and converted over to using SVN. Developers will have to get new accounts, if they wish to continue work on JOTWeb, just ask me.
Tue Apr 13, 2004 21:52: New release, tests removed from RPM.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've release a 1.27 version of JOTWeb. It's got some more work with getting ZPT working, and also includes Charlie's changes so that it works with older mod_python releases. This release is largely so that Charlie can use it as a baseline for packaging for Debian. I've disabled the tests as part of the RPM build process, because there are several tests that fail right now. Several of them are ZPT-related. The other one is related to SimpleTAL. The problem is a SimpleTAL "feature" where SimpleTAL evaluates paths 2 or more times, as has been discussed over the last few weeks on the mailing list. There is now a test that ensures that paths are only evaluated once, but SimpleTAL currently causes that to fail.
Tue Mar 30, 2004 23:09: SimpleTAL multiple-execution patch
Author: Sean ReifschneiderAs those of you who have watched the mailing list may have noticed that there was a problem with SimpleTAL evaluating code in TAL expressions twice. Bad for expressions which have side-effects, or take a long time. I've added a test to JOTWeb to detect this situation, and have uploaded a patch to ftp://ftp.tummy.com/pub/tummy/jotweb/SimpleTAL/SimpleTAL-singleexec.patch. This is against SimpleTAL 3.8, and seems to fix the problem for me. I've asked the SimpleTAL author for input on this patch. You might want to give it a try though.
Sat Mar 27, 2004 13:11: JOTWeb Results from PyCon
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI gave a lightning talk on JOTWeb on Thursday at PyCon 2, and among the questions I got was one from Fred Drake about how hard it was to use Zope TAL outside of Zope. I mentioned that the code complexity and lack of documentation made it quite difficult to do anything more than very simple things. On Friday, Fred spent some time with me, helping me understand some of the things that were causing me problems in the translation. He also reported that they were working on making Zope more modular, so that the TAL implementation (among other things) could be installed on it's own. It doesn't sound like they have any sort of schedule for doing this, but they do intend to do it. It sounds like some of the progress that was made this week on Distutils, plus a bit more, will make it easier for Fred to arrange the Zope packaging for this. Since our talk, I've spent some time with Zope 3 and have built a script that takes the Zope 3 CVS and strips out all the non-TAL stuff. There are problems with the INSTALLED-FILES list that is produced by distutils, but it sounds like Fred is going to work on fixing these issues and I couldn't make any progress on that, either. So, for the time being, I'm going to be using the bdist option and installing that manually for testing. There seem to be many changes since the last copy I used from CVS, released as "z3pt". Among them are that it appears that the latest Zope code requires Python 2.3 or above. I'm going to try to get Zope 3 Page Templates working over the next couple of weeks with JOTWeb. Then I plan to produce some sort of a document to help others do the same.
Thu Mar 25, 2004 14:12: SimpleTAL bug, and more Z3PT Update
Author: Sean ReifschneiderUry Marshak found (or re-found, I don't recall) a problem with SimpleTAL where it will call TALES expressions twice for every occurance. I can't recall if I reported this before and what the results were, but I've re-reported it to Colin, and we'll see what happens with it. I may take a look at it once I get back from PyCon as well. In other news, I gave a Lightning Talk on JOTWeb today at PyCon. Fred Drake asked me how hard it was to pull TAL out of Zope. I mentioned that I got pretty stuck after a while. Both Fred and Jim Fulton (seemed to me) to express interest in helping with that process. I'd be willing to document the process and what I learn, and perhaps can make some further progress. Also, it was mentioned that perhaps I should try the older TAL implementation from Zope 2. That's a good idea. In general, pulling TAL out of Zope 3 and using it for simple things wasn't very bad. It was when I tried to get a bit more complicated where I started running into bigger things. No commitment to bring back Z3PT in JOTWeb, but if I can get over the hurdles I'd like to do it.
Sat Mar 20, 2004 15:04: New release: 1.24, Z3PT Conversion Abandoned
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've released version 1.24 of JOTWeb. It includes all the Z3PT code that I wrote, but the Z3PT renderer is disabled in preference with the SimpleTAL renderer. I've also decided to abandon the Z3PT renderer because the usage of Zope 3 page templates outside of Zope is far too poorly documented. The code that's in there mostly works, but it isn't calling functions in a path, for example calling the path "req/get_options/item", where get_options() is a function returning a dictionary, it fails on trying to resolve "items" under "get_options()". I couldn't figure out how to convert the z3pt code so that it would call functions, and this was not (as far as I could tell) in a "nocall" path. Hrmph. If z3pt support is important to you, you should help on the conversion. The issue I was running into was with the req_info.html sample. To re-enable the z3pt renderer, convert the string "'simpletal'" to "'z3pt'" where it occurs in "bin/gental" and "lib/jotweb/jotweb_mod_python.py". The tests should mostly pass, with the exception that some things are differetly formatted.
Thu Mar 18, 2004 22:18: JOTWeb at PyCon
Author: Sean ReifschneiderWe're just getting ready to leave for PyCon, next week in Washington D.C. If you're going, you should look me up. I'll be arriving Friday evening (the 19th of March) and will be attending for the sprints. My plan is to complete the zpt conversion of JOTWeb. It's been so busy, I have to take vacation to work on JOTWeb. Hope to see you there.
Tue Dec 30, 2003 23:01: Current CVS renders top example page
Author: Sean ReifschneiderThe current CVS version properly renders the top JOTWeb example page. Some of the other pages have problems, which isn't suprising because some of the context information is not getting passed to z3pt engine. I was planning on spending all day working on JOTWeb all day today, then got a call from a client over lunch and had to spend all afternoon with them. Maybe I'll be able to take tomorrow off. Anyway, the current CVS is at the point where folks can at least start poking at it and letting me know what doesn't work from the web interface.
Mon Dec 29, 2003 21:27: Some New Changes to CVS
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've made a few small changes to the CVS release in preperation for getting some further work done during my days off tomorrow and Thursday. The CVS code passes the tests when running on Fedora with SimpleTAL not installed at all. Unfortunately, this is sure to have broken the ability to run with SimpleTAL enabled. However, I doubt the code to select between SimpleTAL and Z3PT ever worked properly. I have also added a psycopg backend to the session code. This was required for me to get anywhere because I'm having problems with pyPgSQL working on Fedora (my development machine). As I mentioned, I hope to be able to spend most of 2 days this week working on getting the Z3PT conversion completed during that time. More news when I get it completed.
Sat Oct 11, 2003 23:58: 1.23 Release Information
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've just released version 1.23 of JotWeb. This version does not include the z3pt changes. This is a back-port of some of the bug-fixes that were submitted and in the z3pt version. I've back-ported those changes. The big one was to fix a problem with Python access to TAL local and global variables. Also, Brian submitted a patch that allows access to XML templates using the TALES syntax.
Sun Sep 07, 2003 20:56: Conversion to z3pt passes tests!
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've just checked into CVS a version of JOTWeb which passes all the current tests using the z3pt engine. Before I release this publicly, I want to make it so that you can select a rendering engine -- between SimpleTAL and z3pt. Most of this work is done, I just need to make a way to select it. Note that this version only handles "gental" output. The mod_python code has not been converted at all to use z3pt. There's now a common rendering interface, so that both gental and mod_python will call into the same code, but I have only done that conversion on gental (which the tests use). Things are getting closer for JOTWeb, but these days I've really only had time to work on JOTWeb on the weekends. The conversion to z3pt has been a fairly large task, so it's just taking time. To try out this code, you will want to use CVS and check out "jotweb" and "z3pt". Go into the z3pt directory and build and install z3pt using "python setup.py bdist_rpm" or similar, then install JOTWeb as you normally would.
Mon Sep 01, 2003 23:09: Current CVS release broken
Author: Sean ReifschneiderThe current code in CVS is not functional. I'm in the middle of converting it to use z3pt instead of SimpleTAL. Currently, it's failing 5 tests (but that means that it's passing 6 tests!). Only gental (the command-line client, used by the tests) has been converted. The mod_python code will be converted once the tests all pass. In the mean-time, the mod_python code is still using older code for rendering, which I'm pretty sure is not working. I'm working to combine the rendering code so that both gental and the mod_python code use exactly the same code, instead of having similar but different code for rendering. In short, do not use the CVS code.
Wed Aug 27, 2003 20:14: Debian install instructions and upcoming development
Author: Sean ReifschneiderJoseph H. Yao sent in some instructions on installing JOTWeb on Debian Unstable. I've added them to the documentation on both the web site and in the "doc" directory. Also, this weekend, being a holiday weekend, I'll have some time to get back into JOTWeb. I plan to spend much of the weekend working on it. In particular, I want to get the ZPT code working, and try setting up some sites using that code. That is my primary goal, is to release a version of JOTWeb which uses ZPT. There have been many complaints about how SimpleTAL renders it's output, particularly when you are doing non-HTML generation which can often be much pickier about how tags are re-written. The ZPT implementation is from Zope 3, and should be quite different. Hopefully, better. ;-)
Wed Aug 13, 2003 01:37: ZPT and Mailing list started
Author: Sean ReifschneiderWe are currently working on switching from SimpleTAL to another TAL implementation. Currently our efforts are going towards using the Zope3 code, because that's likely to be the most compatible with the existing TAL documentation. Unfortunately, SimpleTAL was not generating good output in many cases. The new TAL implementation should not cause any significant changes for current JOTWeb users and pages. More information will be provided when the integration is completed and some existing sites are tested. My goal is to not require any changes to existing pages. Finally, I have created a mailing list for JOTWeb. See the "Contact" page off the main JOTWeb site ( http://jotweb.tummy.com/ ) for information on subscribing and archives.
Sat Jul 26, 2003 00:32: Less frequent releases, more CVS participation.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderBefore I switched over to SourceForge, I was doing releases pretty much after every set of changes I was making. With the public CVS, I've slowed that down a little bit. New changes are regularly going into CVS, but releases will happen when there's more interesting stuff ready. Development has slowed a bit the last couple of weeks because my day job has been very busy. I haven't had time to work much on any web sites or JOTWeb as much as I was before. This probably won't change until mid August, after I'm back from Def Con and have caught up a bit with work. In other new news, there are now 3 more developers with commit privileges to the CVS tree. Hopefully development will continue moving along at a good pace. Interest in JOTWeb has been suprisingly strong for it being such a young project.
Thu Jul 10, 2003 20:19: 1.18 Session Handling may be broken.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderThe expiring of the module cache based on the module's file mtime has a bug in it in version 1.18 of JOTWeb. The fix is to change line 124 of WebContext to read "if module and mtime != oldMtime:". I'm reluctant to release a new verion of JOTWeb right now, becuase I'm waiting for SourceForge to import the current CVS tarfile I sent them into the SourceForge CVS repository. If I make any changes, they'll get out of sync, which I'd like to avoid. So, please either use 1.17 or manually apply the change above if you run into this problem.
Sun Jul 06, 2003 17:37: Deprecating "jotwebconfig" Name.
Author: Sean ReifschneiderWith version 1.17 of JOTWeb, the "jotwebconfig" name will be deprecated. I've created a new TAL root variable called "jotwebnsroot", which will be used to contain JOTWeb-related names. "jotwebconfig" can now be accessed by the name "jotwebnsroot/config".
"jotwebconfig" still works but will be deprecated within the next month. Please change your code to use "jotwebnsroot/config".
This change is being made so that more things can be added to JOTWeb name-spaces without polluting the config or TAL name-spaces.
Fri Jul 04, 2003 15:12: 1.16 Release and Development Priorities
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've released version 1.16. I don't plan to announce new versions here, since that's kind of what the Changelog RSS is for. It kind of leads into a new thrust in development that I'm doing now, which is to concentrate on getting better error reporting available. This is one of the things that is on the list for the first "stable" release (still scheduled for August 29).
While some of the problems with the bad reporting is JOTWeb's fault (not setting up a logger for SimpleTAL), I'm probably also going to have to dig into SimpleTAL some to generate better errors. Better error reporting is what I'm concentrating on right now. It'll get better over the next few releases.
If you run into any error reports that need to be improved, please submit some sample code/pages which can reproduce it, and I'll see what I can do about making the results better.
Sun Jun 29, 2003 02:21: JOTWeb Web-site Changes
Author: Sean ReifschneiderI've made a couple of changes to the JOTWeb site today. First of all, the "What's New" page has been renamed "Changelog", to differentiate it from the "News" link (this page). The Status entries have been removed from the main page and moved into the News page (below).
The other big change is that both the News and Changelog pages now have RSS feeds available for them. This will allow you to use an RSS newsreader or aggregator to show you when there is a new release or new news relating to JOTWeb.
Of course, these pages are all built with JOTWeb. News is built from a dictionary stored in a file with data about each entry. The Changelog page is still pulled from the "WHATSNEW" file on the FTP site, it's just run through a simple parser now to make the entries more attractive on the site and format it properly for the RSS feed. Enjoy!
By the way, if you're looking for an RSS news-reader/aggregator... I went through all of them on Freshmeat, after trying 5+ readers "Pears" was the only one I was able to get working. It requires wxWindows, which is a long but un-eventful build, but works fine.
Sun Jun 29, 2003 02:02: Current Status
Author: Sean ReifschneiderRelease: Beta
I'm not really sure what to call the current release status. While there are definitely things that are going to evolve, JOTWeb is pretty reliable. I expect things to change as more sites get developed with JOTWeb, both by myself and others. I'm not ready to commit to not breaking peoples sites yet, but I'll definitely try to keep that to a minimum.
As far as how it's been working, the sites I've built with it have gone up incredibly smoothly with very little frustration. Sites that I'm running with it have been reliable. I haven't had any sites that stopped working or caused Apache to break, or the like.
I'd like to call it "stable" because I wouldn't hesitate to set up a web-site with it. On the other hand, I'm expecting some code-changes to the API, some of which may cause existing code to break. At this point I'm planning to strive for backwards compatibility wherever possible, though.
I guess I'll say that I'm considering it in beta until the end of August, at which point I'll plan a stable release. Meaning, no significant features added to the stable tree, only bug-fixes.
Sat Jun 28, 2003 18:55: New JOTWeb Release: 1.14
Author: Sean ReifschneiderVersion 1.14 of JOTWeb has been released today. This change is small in size, but is big news because it includes the first user-contributed patch. Thanks, Ethan. See the Changelog for more details on this release.
Mon Jun 23, 2003 00:00: Current Status
Author: Sean ReifschneiderRelease: Preview
I've worked a little on JOTWeb sites this weekend and released a new version that includes a site-wide configuration mechanism. This is a Python program which gets run before page rendering starts and includes veriables that can be accessed from HTML/TAL and Python code. I'm going to experiment with setting up sessions and forms at this level in a new site I'm working on.
Mon Jun 16, 2003 00:00: Current Status
Author: Sean ReifschneiderRelease: Preview
The last few days I've mostly been building sites with JOTWeb instead of working quite so hard on the JOTWeb code itself. There are stlil a few things that I'd like to clean up, mostly utilities and ways of getting access to TAL name-spaces from Python. I've found a few bugs, but mostly the web development has gone very smoothly. Incredibly smoothly on one new site I started up from scratch.