Dan M wrote:
Dennis Benzinger wrote: Is there a Python web publishing framework like Cocoon?
How about:
[List of the usual suspects]
just to name a few of my favorites. Take a look at
http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming for a more complete list.
Although it is good advice to recommend the WebProgramming page,
despite my reservations about its current state, I don't think it is
particularly helpful for everyone to shout out their favourites - as
appears to be the normal practice on this topic - especially when none
of the suggestions seem to share very much architecturally or
technologically with Cocoon. Aside from Maki, which the questioner
mentioned, I'd imagine that 4Suite Server [1] might have some overlap
with Cocoon, although I've never managed to motivate myself past the
introductions/installations and actually experiment with it.
I can certainly admit that I've developed a forms toolkit [2] which
makes use of XSLT, although you won't see in it anything like the
XML-based site map configuration from Cocoon, and whilst I suppose you
could implement such things on top of my toolkit, you'll need to spend
some time replicating some of the other conveniences of Cocoon that it
seems to manage all by itself (or at least after judicious editing of
various lengthy configuration files). If the forms aspects of my
toolkit aren't interesting, you could concentrate on just using
stylesheets, although I will also admit that you could integrate
convenient stylesheet processing with just about any Web framework, and
there may be components out there which do just that.
My experiences with Cocoon suggested that although the site map concept
is rather enticing, one frequently needs to break out of the functional
programming model that it enforces in order to provide more than very
simple application logic, and I wasn't really encouraged by the Cocoon
developers chosen means of doing this (server side JavaScript), nor by
their ability to break functionality between microreleases. If you're
happy transferring the site map logic into Python - not a difficult
task - then you just need to choose a Web framework that doesn't fight
you over how you do things like URL dispatching.
Anyway, if you're interested in using XSLT with Python, speak up or get
in touch. I think it's an area which has been unfairly overshadowed by
more fashionable technologies.
Paul
[1]
http://www.4suite.org/index.xhtml
[2]
http://www.python.org/pypi/XSLTools 
