One thing I'm missing not only in Webware but also the more recent web
frameworks and "mega frameworks" is an integrated reporting component.
In most applications, you want to to create reports, lists, statistics,
(serial) letters etc. in PDF (or RTF, Excel or whatever) format.
One possible solution is using ReportLab as explained here:
http://wiki.w4py.org/pdf-creation-with-reportlab.html.
However, this solution is not very sophisticated. Actually what you need
to do is to fork a separate process for PDF creation, even if the
generation is fast, because ReportLab is not threadsafe. This is also
necessary when the report generation will take more than a few seconds.
So it would be nice if Webware provided some helper functionality for
forking PDF generation processes, storing, caching and removing reports
for individual requests in the file system, notification when reports
are ready, properly delivering reports to the web browser etc.
Another thing I am missing is a html/xml library, i.e. a core support
for generating html and xml code with Python.
E.g., instead of
self.writeln('<a href="http://xyz">abc</a>')
you should be able to write something like
self.a('abc', href="http://xyz")
This will reduce the amount of typing, and automatically guarantee
well-formedness (forgotten angle brackets etc.)
I'm thinking of something similar to the htp/htf library that is part of
Oracle's IAS (http://www.psoug.org/reference/htp.html), or maybe even
simpler. Probably this has already been coded hundreds of time in Python
(e.g. http://dustman.net/andy/python/HyperText/), and maybe there is
something we are allowed to include into Webware, so it will always
available as a core functionality (e.g. as a WebUtils module).
I'd like to hear your thoughts about these issues.
-- Christoph
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