A few weeks ago we reached a nice milestone in the development of our own web application framework : openhexperience., and I did not even think to blog about it.
But first let me introduce openhexperience. This framework is constructed from the experience we have gathered once we were working at Tiny. There we worked on TinyERP (now OpenERP), but we did not want to make the same mistakes that we thought were made in this piece of software. So we decided to rewrite it from the ground up using all the nice goodies the python ecosystem provides and if necessary create the missing pieces.
Gaëtan worked on elixir (a thin layer on top of SQLAlchemy) so that we have an abstracted and easy to use layer on top of the database world. I created relatorio and now we can generate pretty reports. We are using genshi to generate the xml views that are sent to the client. The glue between all the components being a cherrypy server with a custom dispatcher so that we can access the resources in a REST way. To handle translations we opted for the UNIX approach of using gettext, this was made easy by babel and the translator filter of genshi. To all the contributors of all those projects, I have to give a big kudo : your code is a great source of inspiration.
To build our client, we choose the AJAX framework qooxdoo to have a cross-OS, easily deployable solution.
And as I said earlier we reached a nice milestone quite recently because for the first time, we began to mix all the pieces together and so here is the first screenshot:
For now, we still have a lot of work to do to reach a releasable state (some crucial features are yet to be done or integrated, there is no documentation yet, there are not nearly enough showcase modules, etc.), but it begins to look good and we are quite satisfied with the choices we did so far.
If you ever want to try out our framework the sources are available in our mercurial repository.
