Hi,
I'm looking for a clear, simple 10,000 foot overview of how pylons
and its various components work together, preferably with some snazzy
diagrams to point out things like client<-->server request flows and
relationships between the various pylons components.
As a brief introduction, I've been using pylons for a couple of
months now, both for personal enrichment, and as part of what has
become my defacto 'lead web developer' role at the small company where
I work. I am fairly effective with the framework now, and have grown
to like it quite a bit, despite my initial, overblown reservations
about having to learn python.
However, I still find that when I am asked specific questions about
how pylons works, and how it processes requests in combination with a
general purpose webserver like apache2, I don't quite now how to
answer. Furthermore, I don't think I could draw a proper flow diagram
which describes the path by which a client-side request is eventually
processed by the appriate controller, and served using the
corresponding template.
My intuition in this regard, given my company's current setup, is to
respond with something like,
"After our apache rewrite rule and proxy setup forward the client's
request to 127.0.0.1:5000/our_app_prefix/${pagename} the request url
is processed according to the map.connect directives in routing.py.
Once the appropriate map.connect directive is determined, this is used
to look up the corresponding controller, and the appropriate action
and/or view, if specified. The action, which is simply a function of
above controller class, then either returns raw html, or attempts to
render a template if specified.(this leaves out concerns about other
components like the model...)"
however, this 'understanding' is largely something I've come up with
as a result of a little bit of early tutoring, which probably came too
early, combined with a lot of tinkering, and I'm still not at all
confident that it is complete, or even sufficiently accurate as it
stands.
Of course, I've also read through the basic documentation and
tutorials on the main pylons site:
http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonsdocs/Home
These documents are very well written, easy to understand and easy to
follow, however to my mind they only provide a component-wise
explanation of all the various parts of pylons. This gives one an
excellent understanding of where one ought to go, and what files one
needs to edit in order to realize various different changes in an
application, but dolt that I am, even after having read through the
majority of these I still don't feel very well-informed as to how the
various components actually interact, how paste really fits in, and
how a client-side request is actually processed.
I'll be the first to admit that this is probably be something that
real developers, with comp-sci backgrounds simply take for granted,
but it seems that it ought to be fairly simple to come up with a
definitive diagram, or flow chart, which would once and for all help
me, and others in my situation cement this information in our brains,
and thereby enable us to buttress our otherwise prosaic and perhaps
inaccurate explanations with a bit of accurate info which even a
completely non-tech manager can quickly digest.
My current approach, which combines explanations similar to the above,
with extemporaneous tactical evasions: "Well I can't completely
explain the process, but give me a few minutes and I'll whip up an
example." doesn't strike me as particularly inspirational, so I'd very
much like to fill in the remaining gaps both for my own sake and for
others!
Apologies for the long-winded post, but I thought it was finally time
to get this outstanding mental glitch fixed up.
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