lucumr

If you have a look at the current pocoo homepage or the trac you will find out that the project is more or less unmaintained right now. There are many reasons for that but the most important one is that we will probably rework some parts of the webpage in the next time. Why is it like that? About two years ago I was working together with some other people (some of them are now part of the pocoo team) on the German ubuntu portal ubuntuusers.de. We have used and still use a heavily modified phpBB, MoinMoin wiki engine and some other components implemented as django pre-magic removal. Back then WSGI was something that just was a PEP and no implementation.

My big plan was to create a replacement for phpBB in Python and integrate it with Moin. However, two years later it looks like that this is not the best solution either. The main problem with have on ubuntuusers is not, that we have different programming languages, we have different auth systems, templates, databases, storage systems etc. One minor change in a template requires modifications in three different applications.

While we don’t have a solution for ubuntuusers *yet* it turns out that pocoo won’t be one either. However pocoo was and is no failure. One the long path to pocoo we created some good and not so good libraries. There was Colubrid which was one of the first WSGI dispatchers out there and it’s successor Werkzeug which will have it’s first release in two weeks. There is Jinja which is now used on a couple of big django projects, there is Pygments which soon became the favorite sourcecode highlighter of many developers, there will be TextPress around this Christmas, which will be the first big python blog engine as far as I know. Georg Brandl also started the new python documentation project in the pocoo repositories where some of us contributed some code or knowledege.

But what will happen to pocoo? Right now nothing, just that we will probably replace the pocoo.org index page with something that points directly to the projects. After christmas (in fact after the TextPress release) I want to have another look at the pocoo sourcecode and make parts of the code standalone packages. For example the config file parser. And after all that half of the team will have finished a different project which currently takes some of our time and continue working on the pocoo forum, probably with a different name and finally based on all the libraries that evolved around it.

Why I’m writing that today? Around that date two years ago I was setting up the pocoo.org server and reading the WSGI specs. From then on two years of hacking on multiple pieces of software where some of them became popular enough that people are using them :-)

So in that sense: Thanks Georg, Alexander, Benjamin, Christopher, Lukas, Ferdinand, Tassilo and all the others that worked on the pocoo projects :-)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 7:18 pm and tagged as pocoo, python, announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.