We’ve been hacking away on our project at work for the last 3 weeks and things are starting to really roll now. After an initial period where we were fighting with the tools - things seem to be moving a lot more smoothly now.
Things to note when you’re working in Webware:
If you use FormKit - stay the hell away from the CompoundField unless you can help it. CompoundFields get bogged down in complexity too quickly.
Over here, we’ve ended up taking the FormKit and hacking it up into something a little simpler. Some integration was done with FormEncode to get more powerful error handling.
Webware is pretty nice, but my biggest problem with it is that I can actually crash the application server sometimes. Debugging your web application boils down to logging - lots and lots of logging. My suggestion - get your head around the logging modules in Python and roll yourself a log server and logging clients.
The sample code in the latest Python docs should be enough to get you going with some working code. Just remember to use %r when you write something in your formatting strings or else you may get an exception when a None gets passed in.
Stay the hell away from MySQL. It will cause you unnecessary pain. When you think you can ‘get away with’ using MySQL - rethink that choice 47 times and then realize that you are wrong. Just use Postgresql. There’s just no excuse not to.
Some problems we’ve had with MySQL (4.0.17):
popping database connections over TCP/IP
Bizarre errors claiming “You can’t do that now” or something to that effect
Postgresql - well we’ve yet to have a serious problem with the 7.4 series. The only slight problem is that the psycopg doesn’t seem to interoperate between Postgres 7.4 clients and 7.2 servers. I’m pretty sure this has something to do with the new error handling in pgsql 7.4, but I’m not sure.
SQLObject is your friend. I originally hacked out a persistence layer using code generation - but it didn’t pan out. More on that in another post, but the short version is - programmatic interfaces beat static code generation. If you do decide on trying out code generation - a good intro book I found was Code Generation In Action.
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