From tchur at optushome.com.au  Sat Oct  2 09:42:22 2004
From: tchur at optushome.com.au (Tim Churches)
Date: 02 Oct 2004 09:42:22 +1000
Subject: [albatross-users] Twisted and Nevow
In-Reply-To: <1077621715.2526.21.camel@debian>
References: <20040224092509.DD7FB534DE@firewall.darkqueen.org>
	 <1077621715.2526.21.camel@debian>
Message-ID: <1096674142.1282.138.camel@emilio>

See http://www.pollenation.net/journal/matt.php?p=38

Matt, does this mean you've abandoned Albatross? If so, any lessons to
be learnt?

-- 

Tim C

PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere
or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc
Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B  EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0





From sheila at thinkspot.net  Mon Oct 11 11:46:31 2004
From: sheila at thinkspot.net (Sheila King)
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:46:31 -0700
Subject: [albatross-users] Help catching an exception...
In-Reply-To: <1096484180.15746.52.camel@aslan>
References:  <D1639B2F9281437EC7C7239D@lsanca1-ar1-4-62-158-245.lsanca1.dsl-verizon.net>
 <1096484180.15746.52.camel@aslan>
Message-ID: <E22E4BAD7F08A3DA45C5214B@lsanca1-ar1-4-62-158-245.lsanca1.dsl-verizon.net>

I want to thank everyone who replied to my inquiry.

It had been quite a long time since I'd delved into the source code of
app.py, and these types of suggestions were just what I needed to get me
back on track.

Thanks again,

-- 
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org


--On Wednesday, September 29, 2004 2:56 PM -0400 Neal Stephenson
<neal at yorku.ca> wrote:


> HI,
> 
> 	Not sure if this is right, but I override handle_exception in a
> subclass of the Application that I use for all my apps.
> 
> 		Neal
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 14:12, Sheila King wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I'm using Albatross to develop an account management interface for the
>> web hosting company that I work for.
>> 
>> In the testing process, I have determined that certain type of request
>> urls will cause Albatross to throw an exception, and I'm trying to catch
>> that exception to redirect to a public error page of my choosing so that
>> end users do not see the Python tracebacks.
>> 
>> Mind you, it would be some odd circumstance that would even lead to this
>> type of error, but I am hoping to cover as many error situations as I
>> can.
>> 
>> The problem is this:
>> 
>> A correct URL for the application might look like this:
>> 
>> http://example.net/cgi-dev/mgr.py/createlogin
>> 
>> But suppose this URL is requested instead:
>> http://example.net/cgi-dev/mgr.py/mgr.py/createlogin
>> 
>> Then albatross gives the following traceback:
>> -----
>> Template traceback (most recent call last):
>> 
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "albatross/app.py", line 279, in run
>>     self.load_page(ctx)
>>   File "albatross/randompage.py", line 29, in load_page
>>     self.load_page_module(ctx, page)
>>   File "albatross/app.py", line 435, in load_page_module
>>     raise ApplicationError('%s (in %s)' % (e, mod_dir))
>> ApplicationError: No module named createlogin (in ./pages/mgr/py)
>> -----
>> 
>> 
>> In the __main__ function of the mgr.py file I tried adding 
>> a try/except to wrap the whole invocation of an albatross app
>> (I know...bad programming...but...well...)
>> 
>> Here is the except block I put on:
>> 
>>     except ApplicationError, e:
>>         Request = "http://www.Example.net/cgi-bin/mgr.py/errorpage"
>>         app = qaApp()
>>         ctx = qaAppContext(app)
>>         ctx.locals._errmssg = e
>>         app.run(qaRequest(Request))
>>         
>> Unfortunately, it appears to be having no effect, and I am still
>> getting the identical traceback as before.
>> 
>> I also tried changing the "except" statement to
>> 
>> except albatross.ApplicationError, e
>> 
>> and also tried adding an import statement at the top of the code
>> 
>> from albatross.common import AlbatrossError
>> 
>> and changing the except statement to:
>> 
>> except AlbatrossError, e
>> 
>> But again, no change in the traceback produced for that particular URL.
>> 
>> 
>> I sure would appreciate any tips on how to catch this error and
>> redirect to an error page of my choosing...
>> 
>> Thank you,
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Albatross-users mailing list
>> Albatross-users at object-craft.com.au
>> https://www.object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/albatross-users
> -- 
> Neal Stephenson <neal at yorku.ca>         Phone:  (416) 736-2100 x40211
> Manager, Development Services           Fax:    (416) 736-5830
> Communication and Network Services      Steacie T103, 4700 Keele St.
> York University                         Toronto, On., Canada M3J 1P3
> 
> 
> 




From andrewm at object-craft.com.au  Mon Oct 18 22:14:30 2004
From: andrewm at object-craft.com.au (Andrew McNamara)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 22:14:30 +1000
Subject: [albatross-users] Release 1.11
Message-ID: <20041018121430.6848D3C8E2@coffee.object-craft.com.au>

I've posted a 1.11 release of Albatross on the web site:

    http://www.object-craft.com.au/projects/albatross/download.html

Note that the only change between this and 1.11pre2 is the version number.

I'm working on a 1.2, which will be based on albatross-1.2-dev-20040203.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/


From andrewm at object-craft.com.au  Tue Oct 19 23:51:42 2004
From: andrewm at object-craft.com.au (Andrew McNamara)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 23:51:42 +1000
Subject: [albatross-users] Albatross 1.20 released
Message-ID: <20041019135142.0B2F23C24C@coffee.object-craft.com.au>

OVERVIEW

Albatross is a small toolkit for developing highly stateful web
applications.

The toolkit has been designed to take a lot of the pain out of
constructing intranet applications although you can also use Albatross
for deploying publicly accessed web applications.

In slightly more than 3000 lines of Python (according to pycount) you
get the following:

  * An extensible HTML templating system similar to DTML including tags for:
    - Conditional processing.
    - Macro definition and expansion.
    - Sequence iteration and pagination.
    - Tree browsing.
    - Lookup tables to translate Python values to arbitrary template
      text.

  * Application classes which offer the following features:
    - Optional server side or browser side sessions.
    - The ability to place Python code for each page in a dynamically
      loaded module, or to place all page processing code in a single
      mainline.

  * The ability to deploy applications as CGI, FastCGI, mod_python or
    a pure python HTTP server by changing less than 10 lines of code.

The toolkit application functionality is defined by a collection of
fine grained mixin classes.  Nine different application types and six
different execution contexts are prepackaged, you are able to define
your own drop in replacements for any of the mixins to alter any
aspect of the toolkit semantics.

Application deployment is controlled by your choice of either cgi,
FastCGI, mod_python, or BaseHTTPServer Request class.  It should be
possible to develop a Request class for Medusa or Twisted to allow
applications to be deployed on those platforms with minimal changes.

Albatross comes with over 160 pages of documentation.  HTML, PDF and
PostScript formatted documentation is available from the toolkit
homepage.

The toolkit homepage:

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

The Albatross mailing list subscription and archives:

	http://object-craft.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/albatross-users


CHANGES SINCE 1.1

There have been many improvements and bug fixes since release 1.1.
The following page describes the changes in detail.

    http://www.object-craft.com.au/projects/albatross/albatross/rel-1.20.html

Highlights include:

  * A new BranchingSessionContext application context class, that provides
    better syncronisation between browser state and application state
    when the application state is stored server-side.

  * Improved adapters for the different deployment modes (CGI, FastCGI,
    mod_python, standalone, etc). Application status codes (such as
    HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR) are now returned to the browser.

  * The page module loader in PageModuleMixin has been reimplemented so
    that it does not pollute sys.modules. Page modules are now loaded
    into a synthetic module's namespace, rather than the global module
    namespace. This will break code that defined classes in page modules
    and placed instances of those classes into the session.

  * Multi-instance response headers are now supported (so, for example,
    more than one Cookie can be set. The ResponseMixin.get_header() method
    now returns a list rather than a single string.  ctx.req_equals(name)
    now checks for name.x if name is not found. This makes using image
    maps as buttons easier.

  * Under some circumstances, redirect_url() would redirect to incorrect
    or invalid URLs (for example, an https app would redirect to http)
    - the URI parsing has been refactored, and this bug has been
    fixed. Tests were also added for the refactored URI parsing.

  * Several cookie handling bugs were fixed.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/


From gnb at itga.com.au  Tue Oct 26 16:57:40 2004
From: gnb at itga.com.au (Gregory Bond)
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:57:40 +1000
Subject: [albatross-users] Web-based SQL record editor?
Message-ID: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au>

[A bit OT for the Albatross list, but maybe not.]

I'm looking for something that will allow me to easily whip up simple 
web pages to edit/delete/add records to an SQL database.  Ideally, it 
would know enough about Sybase system tables to extract DB schema etc 
itself without a whole heap o configuration.  Ideally, in python to work 
with Albatross, but I'll look at other languages/toolkits.

I can't imagine I'm the first person to ask about this, but an hour or 
two of googling/sourceforge searching only turned up MySQL admin tools.  
Maybe I just don't know what to ask for.




From andrewm at object-craft.com.au  Tue Oct 26 17:26:15 2004
From: andrewm at object-craft.com.au (Andrew McNamara)
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 17:26:15 +1000
Subject: [albatross-users] Web-based SQL record editor? 
In-Reply-To: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au> 
References: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au>
Message-ID: <20041026072615.0FE8F3C79E@coffee.object-craft.com.au>

>[A bit OT for the Albatross list, but maybe not.]
>
>I'm looking for something that will allow me to easily whip up simple 
>web pages to edit/delete/add records to an SQL database.  Ideally, it 
>would know enough about Sybase system tables to extract DB schema etc 
>itself without a whole heap o configuration.  Ideally, in python to work 
>with Albatross, but I'll look at other languages/toolkits.
>
>I can't imagine I'm the first person to ask about this, but an hour or 
>two of googling/sourceforge searching only turned up MySQL admin tools.  
>Maybe I just don't know what to ask for.

That's because it's a big hard ugly problem in the skin of a trivial
problem... 8-)

I've looked at a whole bunch of "solutions" to this problem, as well as
having written a few of my own (the most recent of which were done for
clients) - none of them are entirely satisfactory.

The "object-relational" adapters (of which there are several fairly
complete Python examples) are not entirely suitable for use in Albatross
apps - the primary problem being the object life cycle: typically
they deserialise objects from the database and back again, but for an
Albatross database object, you also want to be able to serialise the
object in the session while you're working on it.

The other problem you will trip over is type conversions. For quick and
dirty web interfaces to database rows, the temptation is to expose the
database-object directly in the form - this works... to a point.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/


From neel at mediapulse.com  Tue Oct 26 23:41:10 2004
From: neel at mediapulse.com (Michael C. Neel)
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:41:10 -0400
Subject: [albatross-users] Web-based SQL record editor?
In-Reply-To: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au>
References: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au>
Message-ID: <1098798070.20552.5.camel@mike.mediapulse.com>

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 02:57, Gregory Bond wrote:
> [A bit OT for the Albatross list, but maybe not.]
> 
> I'm looking for something that will allow me to easily whip up simple 
> web pages to edit/delete/add records to an SQL database.  Ideally, it 
> would know enough about Sybase system tables to extract DB schema etc 
> itself without a whole heap o configuration.  Ideally, in python to work 
> with Albatross, but I'll look at other languages/toolkits.
> 
> I can't imagine I'm the first person to ask about this, but an hour or 
> two of googling/sourceforge searching only turned up MySQL admin tools.  
> Maybe I just don't know what to ask for.

It's going to be harder, since you are looking for a tool to a closed
source database (sybase --> ms sql?).  If you can run either MySQL or
Postgres, the sf.net projects PHPMyAdmin and PHPPgAdmin are very well
written and robust (and very similar to each other).  There also maybe a
port of either of these to Sysbase.  Usally closed source databases
include a gui managment tool (though maybe not web enabled), so there
probably isn't alot of draw to rewrite one.  I'm sure there would be a
few commercial packages for what you are looking for however.

Mike



From daryl at learnhouston.com  Tue Oct 26 23:51:30 2004
From: daryl at learnhouston.com (Daryl L. L. Houston)
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:51:30 -0400
Subject: [albatross-users] Web-based SQL record editor?
In-Reply-To: <1098798070.20552.5.camel@mike.mediapulse.com>
References: <417DF564.30207@itga.com.au> <1098798070.20552.5.camel@mike.mediapulse.com>
Message-ID: <417E5662.2000008@learnhouston.com>

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 02:57, Gregory Bond wrote:

>>[A bit OT for the Albatross list, but maybe not.]
>>
>>I'm looking for something that will allow me to easily whip up simple 
>>web pages to edit/delete/add records to an SQL database.  Ideally, it 
>>would know enough about Sybase system tables to extract DB schema etc 
>>itself without a whole heap o configuration.  Ideally, in python to work 
>>with Albatross, but I'll look at other languages/toolkits.
>>
>>I can't imagine I'm the first person to ask about this, but an hour or 
>>two of googling/sourceforge searching only turned up MySQL admin tools.  
>>Maybe I just don't know what to ask for.
>>    
>>

FWIW, PHP's got pretty good support for sybase, though processing error 
output can be a real pain. I don't know of any toolkits specifically for 
doing what you want, though I'm sure there are plenty of abstraction 
layers that would make the actual data manipulation piece fairly 
transparent. I'm on board with Mike's suggestion that you consider 
switching to mysql or postgres. Newer versions of mysql using InnoDB 
tables support much of what's supported by sybase/mssql, and I hear 
postgres is very robust, though I've never used it in production and 
have found its differences from standard SQL and its management to be 
sort of foreign.

If you can't make the switch, you might consider looking at sqsh.org, 
where you'll find CLI utility for manipulating sybase databases.  It 
supports scripting that perhaps you could tap into through a Web 
interface (though it's not a task I'd want to undertake) to build the 
tool you need. Probably easier just to use PHP.

D