Groovie

I can’t help but get totally baffled when I see a business model like this.

Yes, that’s right, you can pay for the privilege of keeping a copy of your distributed version control system (DVCS) private repositories on someone else’s machines. You also get to pay depending on how many people you want to allow to collaborate on it.

Nevermind that one of the entire points of a DVCS is that you do NOT need a central repository. Does anyone actually work at a “Large Company” (as the page indicates) that would be stupid enough to pay $100/month so they can put all their proprietary and very personal code repositories on a third party web service?

So what are you paying for? Well, to start with, they have awesome integration with Lighthouse, since we all know there’s no decent free open-source issue tracking system… cough trac cough roundup cough. Oh wait, since there’s absolutely no simple web-based issue tracking systems, let’s have another slick business model to get people to pay for a stripped down Trac (but this time with a really pretty UI)!

What do these sites have in common? Rails, “look ma, I can copy-paste the business plan too” pricing models, and some good graphic designers at the helm. There also seems to be an interesting amount of promotion between these sites, as well as a nice blog post from the Rails creator himself promoting GitHub. I’m sure no one who has read this rant should be surprised though.

I only hope that no one starts to believe that a DVCS actually requires these “please pay” copies of their DVCS repo.

Rails, and Ruby in general has had Capistrano for awhile now to help with the task of deployment and automating builds for servers, and even clusters of servers. Where is something like this for Python?

Now, before people note that I could easily use Capistrano for my Python project, I should note that it is rather annoying having to install yet another language. On the other hand, given that I will likely only need to install it on my development machine (which running OSX already has Ruby… and gems), it doesn’t seem too horrible to just use Capistrano and be done with it.

However, Capistrano doesn’t quite manage the Python egg’s, and the task isn’t exactly trivial. zc.buildout, which I previously ranted about due to odd docs does the management pretty well. It even results in a rather consistent build experience no matter where it occurs. Two commands, and boom, the app is ready to go.

Unfortunately, life isn’t quite that easy. When something does go wrong with buildout, trying to track it down can be exceptionally hairy. Having a tool so ‘magical’ as I’ve heard some describe it, carries its own penalties when things fail. Buildout also fails to automate the task of deploying the app itself to the other machine, which is still a manual process. It does manage egg’s rather well, though it does some very odd mangling of sys.path to accomplish this in every script.

I don’t need something as full featured as Capistrano, but I’d love to see something that has no more requirements than I’m already depending on (Python), that can handle the task of easily automating deployment of a Python application – including ensuring all the proper versions of the eggs I want are used – on a remote *nix machine. I recall seeing a post (I think by Jeff Rush) awhile back, on a system just like this that he unfortunately never released. Vellum also looks like it could be hacked further to do this task…

Is there some build/deployment tool that is just Python that I’ve missed? Something that will let me setup a script for some commands on how to deploy my app on another server and setup (hopefully in a virtualenv) the webapp so its ready-to-run (and optionally restart it/migrate the db/etc :)?

On the Internet, I frequently see terms misapplied to other contexts. Whether its a basic definition misapplied to a different realm, or an analogy grossly misapplied to a context that is not in fact similar. Since this particular term ‘conceptual integrity’ however was used as a beating stick on Pylons, I felt it’s something worth discussing.

First, its very useful to actually understand the context of the book the term comes from, The Mythical Man-Month. The Mythical Man-Month is about Fred Brooks observations as a manager on the OS/360 project at IBM, and the problems encountered when developing an OS for end-users. Before getting into the question of whether an OS end-user is equivalent to a web framework end-user, its useful to look at the term being referred to, ‘conceptual integrity’.

Wikipedia has a fairly good summary of the term:

Conceptual Integrity

To make a user-friendly system, the system must have conceptual integrity, which can only be achieved by separating architecture from implementation. A single chief architect (or a small number of architects), acting on the user’s behalf, decides what goes in the system and what stays out. A “super cool” idea by someone may not be included if it does not fit seamlessly with the overall system design. In fact, to ensure a user-friendly system, a system may deliberately provide fewer features than it is capable of. The point is that if a system is too complicated to use, then many of its features will go unused because no one has the time to learn how to use them.

Is there Conceptual Integrity?

The Pylons developers, including myself, spend quite a bit of time deciding what goes into Pylons, and what does not. Pylons is in fact very very small at its core due to our refusal to let ‘stuff’ into Pylons that is outside its strictly defined scope. In fact, a great many comments I get are usually about features people want, but that aren’t in the scope of Pylons to provide. I would argue that this does show thought has gone into ‘conceptual integrity’, in the explicit decisions made about what is and isn’t provided.

The scope of Pylons is to provide a small, concise, WSGI-driven, lightweight framework, that provides the flexibility for a web developer to use the best tools for the job at hand for building their web application. I would argue based on the definition, the goal of Pylons, and what Pylons has in it now, that it fully meets the design goal of having conceptual integrity with regards to feature scope.

While the original blog post I cited above starts with conceptual integrity, it delves deeply into framework design issues like, ‘Should a framework pick the ORM for you?’. This is slightly odd in the context of Pylons, as the default ORM, and template language are chosen, Pylons merely emphasizes that the choice is yours should you wish to change it (as does Django).

In another misapplied analogy, a parallel is drawn up between having an opinion on a writing style, to having an opinion on a library. Consider how odd this analogy is, that the fairly minor effect of adding a trailing ‘S’, should be compared to whether a particular ORM library is capable of meeting your demands. Should the framework authors decide whether the ORM meets your demands? Should the framework lose a significant amount of capability the second its stock ORM fails to handle your needs? These are interesting questions, well beyond an attempt to draw a parallel to adding a trailing ‘S’ to a word.

Since its clear that Pylons doesn’t encroach on conceptual integrity regarding features that are unused, the next aspect to look at is the concept of a ‘user-friendly system’. This becomes a little more difficult to analyze, because it brings into question the expectations one has of the ‘user-base’. It also shows how the original term of conceptual integrity was misapplied as another parallel is drawn, this time one that I think all web developers should be somewhat terrified by.

Website end-user == Website Programmer?

The last parallel, is to compare the programming expertise of a web developer, to the internet naivety of the website end-user. (Does that offend any other web developers?) The latter of which is well documented in various web usability books, such as the “Don’t Make Me Think” book. The underlying concept being:

• Website users have short attention spans
• Website users won’t use a website that requires thinking
• Website users have no patience

The thesis of this parallel is that a framework author is somehow in the superior position of knowing the appropriate library that will work for your task, and should therefore decide the tools for you. The parallel applied looks like:

• Website programmers have short attention spans (ok, I somewhat buy this one :)
• Website programmers won’t think about whether the tools at hand will accomplish their task
• Website programmers have no patience (Given the languages you have to learn to do anything, I seriously doubt this)

Now, there are quite a few website programmers that don’t think about whether the tools they use, work best for their task. I have seen many websites that are slow, inefficient, or just not well designed because of a lack of thinking regarding architecture, and tool choices. I would not consider these to be website programmers I would want to work with, nor are they the target audience or ‘end-user’ of Pylons. The door is purposely left open in Pylons, and lit up, with the choice available in libraries to use with Pylons.

Regarding making decisions, Pylons has choices for all the same components as Django has decided on: ORM: SQLAlchemy Templating: Mako URL’s: Routes Sessions: Beaker Caching: Beaker

The main problem apparently being, Pylons has emphasized that there is choice, that the framework is built so that they could be swapped, should one of these not be the best tool for your web application.

The Pilot System

When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a pilot plant that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system. This second smarter system should be the one delivered to the customer, since delivery of the pilot system would cause nothing but agony to the customer, and possibly ruin the system’s reputation and maybe even the company’s.

In response to the original post regarding conceptual integrity, I submit the issue of the pilot system. Django and other frameworks that start off with libraries you didn’t analyze in regards to your particular web application, have more than a few times led to pilot systems (I usually hear about the second incarnation, which was then done on Pylons).

Where you realize later down the road, “wow, this ORM just can’t handle the data model I have”, which then leads to, “well, since the ORM was hooked into the XML serializer, the admin UI, the form generator, etc. there’s now no competitive advantage over Pylons… which didn’t have those extras.” Systems with heavy and deep integration of libraries that may or may not meet your demands, where large parts of the system become relatively useless should you stop using one part of it, are extremely prone to being a pilot system.

When your pilot system is done, I invite you to check out Pylons, and think about what is going to work for your website application.

Notes

Please note that I take deliberate care in referring to Pylons for use with developing web applications, its my belief that Django, and similar systems in other languages with an ‘app’ centric approach like Joomla, Drupal, etc. are excellent for making web sites. While you can easily make websites with Pylons apps, this is definitely not the primary use-case emphasized and designed for, so it is harder and less obvious in many respects than Django.

The other thing everyone should’ve learned from these posts, is that The Mythical Man-Month is a rather good book worth reading. ;)

Tonight I was drifting through Upcoming to see what’s happening in my area. Turns out the first page of 50 some events only covered today…. and its a ‘boring’ Wednesday. As I flipped through page after page, eventually getting all the way up to this upcoming Sunday… it occurred to me that there is way way too much happening within a mere 30 miles of me.

Of course, being a geek I’ve been thinking about ways to try and narrow down this list so I can actually get a useful list for what I’d prolly be interested in for the next 45 days. There’s just no way I can look through 1200 events to see what’s going on for the next month, and I like to plan ahead.

A few things I think would help to begin with would be keyword filtering, of course the next step that requires would be some way to build a useful keylist of what should be flagged for my perusal. Trying to generate a full list of every keyword I might be interested in is going to be pretty tough, though I finally thought of the one application I have which could yield the best list of keywords to filter on… Delicious Library.

It already knows the vast majority of books I own, and all my DVD’s. That’s not a bad starting point, toss in all the music I’ve bought from scouring all the id3 tags on my digital music and that’ll cover my music. I really need a way to pull all my previously watched, and upcoming movies from Netflix, in addition to mining all the data of who was in each flick (IMDB should have that). After which I should have a decent set of keywords to ensure I don’t miss either some special premier with an actor I might like, or a comedian doing standup.

Is there anything like this already that I just haven’t found? Clearly, I’d want to keep this massive keyword list personal, so the software to pull from upcoming would narrow down the result set locally. I’m still a bit too privacy obsessed to consider putting such a massive amount of information into a single vendors hands. :)

I’ve been seeing more and more movies I wouldn’t mind actually buying… except that I have a 56” HD TV set. It looks amazing, pretty good with DVD’s, but really amazing with HD so if I’m going to buy a movie I sure as heck want it in HD.

Unfortunately thanks to the tech companies refusing to come up with a single standard, I can either buy a $200 HD-DVD add-on for my Xbox 360, or a PlayStation 3 which I’ve heard is the cheapest Blu-Ray DVD player available. And of course, I really need to buy both if I want HD movies since some studios are only putting their movies out on one or the other format.

The end result? I’m not buying HD movies for HD-DVD or Blu-ray because its pathetic to have to have 2 players around (no, I don’t care about universal players). In addition, I’m not buying DVD’s anymore since I know that in a year or two I’ll want to re-buy it in whatever HD format wins (please let one of them win in a year or two!!!).

What are other people doing in this situation? Buying one or the other? Still buying DVD’s? Or not buying any movies at all until they get it straight?