[PEAK] peak.web has landed (but is still very alpha)

[Phillip J. Eby]

FYI, I just checked in the last of the critical PWT features.  There are 
still a half-dozen or so features I'd like to add, and this is unlikely to 
be the end of the refactoring.  But, we now have basically the features I 
wanted to put in place this month.  As I try to actually build applications 
on top of them, the implementation and maybe some of the API is likely to 
change.  It's been a rather long while since we had anything in PEAK that's 
quite as "raw" as this in terms of its alphaness, so I feel I should warn 
everyone that, yeah, most of PEAK's "alpha" is more stable than some 
system's "stable", but peak.web really really *is* "alpha".

That having been said, the basic concepts of views, resources, skins, 
layers, and PWT actually are quite stable, in that they've basically been 
there for quite some time.  It's only the details that have been 
fluctuating.  But what details!

I don't have a firm plan yet for what comes next.  My first thought is that 
I'm going to take a bit of time off from coding to catch up on housework, 
bookkeeping, and other things I've been neglecting in the last three 
weeks.  Then, I think a next step might be to create some "Hello World" web 
apps to write up in the IntroToPeak tutorial on the Wiki.  This will help 
me polish up the API a little bit, as I discover what bits look really 
silly when you try to explain them to somebody else.  :)

I don't expect to do a very in-depth tutorial, just enough to show how DMs 
map into the web layer, and basic templating.  After that, I'll probably 
move on to writing a simple blogging application.  But first, I'll have to 
design it, and in the process, there will probably arise issues with either 
the feature set or the API design of peak.web, and I'll be back to hacking 
on that stuff.

I'll probably also take a few looks ahead at designing "tier 2" 
functionality like menus, web forms, and maybe even 
authentication/authorization.

At this time, however, I don't have a planned delivery timeframe for any of 
these items.  In between them, I need to do things like finish PEP 333, 
maybe document the 'wsgiref' library, and possibly implement a server 
migration, OS upgrade on a machine or two, and lots of "real world" (i.e. 
non-computer) tasks as well.