About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 70644 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Controller freaks

The recent posting by Ben Bangert entitled "Best of breed Controllers for MVC web frameworks" is interesting reading. (Also see his followup with corrections.) Rather than trying to stage a showdown, he's noting significant similarities between the controller styles in CherryPy, Myghty, Bricks, Aquarium, Ruby on Rails, and Django. The implication I take is that this (mostly independent) convergence might be telling us something about smart web application development.

The post is worth reading for the comment thread alone, with posts from core Zope, CherryPy, Django, and TurboGears developers (among others) and a great little discussion of the history of object publishing on the web.

Bangert is also the author of Routes -- a Python adaptation of the Rails technology of the same name that provides a readable and powerful URL mapping (and URL generation) mechanism.

Monday, October 3rd, 2005
django + python + rails + web frameworks