Blue Sky On Mars

VERY nice 20 minute tutorial video, Kevin. I was pleased to see you using HTTPRedirect in particular (my baby ;). But, how could you write the title “All your pages” and not add “…are belong to us”?

One thing I noticed in particular is the use of: input type=’hidden’. If you switch the URL scheme to use /pname/edit instead of /edit?pagename=pname, you can completely do away with the hidden input elements. Now, that does mean using a default method in your controller, which is probably too advanced to explain in a short tutorial. But if TG provided a base class which used the virtual path (pname), looked up the item (Page object) for you based on that ID (pname), and then dispatched based on the rest of the path (/edit -> self.edit), that would be VERY cool. That’s essentially what I do, but with CP plus Dejavu, my own ORM.

I wrote a recipe for Resource.default here: http://www.cherrypy.org/wiki/RestfulResource

The written version of the tutorial actually talks about that. It’s something I dropped from the screencast to save time.

What happens is the “new” variable starts out as a boolean. When Kid gets ahold of it to send it out on the web, it turns into a string (eg “True”). So, it comes in to CherryPy as the string “True”, which is what I check for in the screencast. (It wouldn’t work properly otherwise…)

In the written version of the “20 Minute Wiki”, I use a validator to convert the value to a real boolean.

Since I didn’t need them myself, right now it’s roll-your-own. There’s nothing in TurboGears’ choice of tools that will make them harder than in other tools, and I think (if we know how people *want* it to work), there are things we can do that will make them easier.