[albatross-users] Albatross Production Ready / Typical use?

[Matt Goodall]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 21:22, rtjohan at syspres.com wrote:
> Are there some large website that have been developed with Albatross?
> What type of sites (size/complexity/number of devlopers/intra vs. internet)
> is Albatross specifically well suited for?

I would say Albatross is very well suited for web _applications_ where
managing state can become quite tricky, tedious and error prone. Having
said that, it's working great for less stateful applications too.

I'm using Albatross to develop a two-part application. It's actually two
Albatross applications: a backend, highly stateful administration system
and a public, more typical website. The other app I'm working on at the
moment is a standalone, single-user application designed to run on the
user's computer.

In terms of application complexity I would say you have the same
limitations that any application running in a web server process has.
Albatross will certainly help reduce the complexity of the application
code that processes HTTP requests but that's really all it does. The
application (basically a controller) is easy to set up, session
management is simple, the templating engine is powerful (custom tags are
great!), etc.

Intra vs Internet? Neither would be a problem for Albatross. Large
applications are easy to manage but it's sufficiently lightweight that
you could even deploy a whole suite of smaller, specialised applications
on an intranet if that made sense.

Albatross seems to have been used in quite diverse ways. I'm writing the
apps mentioned above; I think Object Craft developed an embedded
application; various people seem to be using it on intranets; it's used
by a university (I think) for some form of statistical analysis; some
are using it for large, high-volume sites; it's being used for the
frontend to an open source spam filtering application.


> Is it being widely used? Seems like this list has been pretty quite. 

The mailing list seems to have peaks and troughs, it's certainly quiet
right now. I suspect everyone is quite busy, I know I am. Unfortunately,
I don't know how many "everyone" is.


> Maybe
> everyone is using it happily, the documentation is so good that nobody has
> questions, 

The documentation is very good and there's a wiki to back it up. When
someone does have a problem the mailing list tends to get busier.


> and the system is so reliable that no bugs are reported.

Not many bugs come up. The ones that do are probably for so called
"random" applications and they're often from me ;-). I /think/ I'm
pushing this side of Albatross a bit harder than most other users
though.

The good news is that it's Python and the Albatross code is easy enough
to follow so fixing bugs that do appear is generally quite easy. Please
don't look back at the chaos one of my patches caused in a pre 1.10
release though ;-).

The guys at Object Craft who maintain Albatross tend to react very
positively to bug fixes, feature requests and general suggestions.


> The alternative is that its not being used very much.

Don't be so cynical ;-).

Seriously, I had quite a good look around before deciding on Albatross.
Albatross has got some really nice, powerful features and it's so simple
to use (it took me about 30 minutes to write my first Albatross
application). Albatross does a fair amount for you without getting in
the way.

Have a play, use the documentation and the wiki and please ask here if
you have any specific questions.

Cheers, Matt

-- 
Matt Goodall, Pollenation Internet Ltd
w: http://www.pollenation.net
e: matt at pollenation.net