[albatross-users] Plans for next release?

[Dave Cole]

Michael Neel wrote:
>>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).

That all sounds quite exciting.  Will the license for SnakeSkin allow 
code to go in the other direction?  If some of the ideas prove to be 
very good I would like to have the option of migrating them back into 
Albatross.

There are lots of ideas that we have for Albatross, we are just 
reluctant to disrupt what is already there for an unknown return.  As 
you rightly point out - we are mindful of disruption to existing long 
running project developments and are uncomfortable experimenting with 
that user base.

- Dave

-- 
http://www.object-craft.com.au