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Separation of content and code for web (was Re: Python for web?)

Richie Hindle richie at entrian.com
Tue Dec 2 09:21:42 EST 2003 
Peter,

> One thing that I find interesting, after a 15-second perusal of the 
> examples, is how incredibly close our own fledgling implementation is,
> to the point of matching the "clone template row, delete, fill in table
> with replacements" sequence, almost down to the API.

That's reassuring - at least I know I'm not the only one who thinks it
makes sense.

> I'm looking forward to a more extensive look at it.  (I was about to say
> I'd be happy to contribute improvements, but we (a company) were planning 
> to release our own under a BSD license at some point, whereas I see yours 
> has the more restrictive SleepyCat license (commercial use for a fee only), 
> so I'm afraid I might do nothing more than pick over the best ideas from 
> your API rather than look into the code itself.)

Note that the Sleepycat license means "closed-source redistribution for a
fee only" - any redistribution with full source is free, and commercial
*use* on your own server machines is free (rather annoyingly for someone
who wants to make money from server-based software but remain
GPL-compatible and generally Open-Source-friendly).  (If this sparks a
licensing rant, *please* start a new thread, whoever does so!)

If it's a choice between relicensing under the BSD license or being
superseded by a better implementation released by you under a BSD license,
I'd be quite happy to relicense PyMeld under a BSD license.  I don't have
the time to improve it myself, and I don't believe it's a viable
commercial product for a lot of people because of its limited performance,
so I'd rather it survived and grew under a completely free license than
died.  Improving the performance is not hard, but I don't have the time.

You might want to also look at PyMeldLite, which is currently available as
part of the SpamBayes project.  That's Python-licenced, and has exactly
the same API and capabilities as PyMeld.  The reason it's 'Lite' is that
it only works with perfectly valid XHTML, whereas PyMeld will work with
any old real-world HTML you care to throw at it (pretty much).  I haven't
done a thorough test, but PyMeldLite is almost certainly faster in a lot
of cases than PyMeld, and speeding it up is probably even easier.  You can
get it from here:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/spambayes/spambayes/spambayes/PyMeldLite.py?content-type=text%2Fplain&rev=1.7

or here:

http://tinyurl.com/xcwb

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com
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