[albatross-users] Plans for next release?

[Michael Neel]

> On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 05:06, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > Are there any plans to make a new release of Albatross soon? :)
> >
> > There's some stuff in the development version that could well be
> > released. I'm afraid chances are slim it could make the sarge release of
> > Debian, but who knows?
>
> Yes, our applications rely on features in the latest "dev" release - it
> would be nice if that became an official release at least.

We decided to start adding in some features to Albatross ourselves, since
the list and development slowed down early this year.  It got to the point
we thought it better to work on it as a new project, based off of the old,
rather than continue to treat it as Albatross with patches, which if they
didn't get added could leave us with alot of work needed after each release.
So we decided to call it SnakeSkin, and changed the tags to ss- vs al- to
make it clear we wern't attempting to run application written for albatross
under snakeskin.

SnakeSkin is coming at the design from a slightly different view point.  The
vibe I've picked up here is that most Albatross developers are supporting a
few large applications that have long development times.  While we do have
applications that fit that descriptions (I'm working on one atm and two year
long projects are now ending their beta test phase), we also have several
projects much smaller in scale.  Add to this that our designers now use the
system for normal public websites (the template system is pretty flexable
and they know a programmer can always add a tag to get them out of a jam).
So our focus has been getting snakeskin to scale down rather than up.

To do this, we've been adding in features (or keeping them in a list for
when we can) to put common tasks into the system.  The first of these was
SQL support, both into the application and template.  Tags that got sql
attributes were exec, for, and select, and also added some ctx methods to
get a cursor, database conection, and a quick execute method. We also added
in more paging options to jump to a page, or goto the first or last page.
We replaced the way escaping works with a system to allow either url style
escaping (%20) or html escaping ( ) and mark some characters as 'safe'
so they wouldn't be escaped.  I added in letting dicts be used as lists can
be in input tags (nameexpr).  There is the option of using expr in an expand
to dynamically name the macro to be run.  Last of the current additions is a
request class to be used with mod_python and Apache 2.0 as a filter (I use
this currently on a site to use albatross to 'skin' and cgi/perl based bbs).

On our list is logging support, profile help, and some of the macro
additions for arguments mentioned here on the list.  A biggie on the list is
data validation, both server and client (javascript).  And docs never hurt.

If there is any intrest we can setup a quick site and mailing list for
snakeskin.  Development is ongoing pretty rapidly atm, so I wouldn't count
on a site using snakeskin now being able to upgrade without some tweaks.
We've alwyas installed albatross/snakeskin per site instead of in
site-packages so that we wouldn't have to update 30 some sites for each
release, they could be updated as needed (say along with a site upgrade).

Mike