A First shot at web2py

By Joseph Jude on March 8, 2009
Posted Under: Programming
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An irony of being in software industry is that as I gain more experience, I go farther away from constructing software. I keep learning lots of abstract concepts, but don’t get to test them. Not to be out-dated, I write pieces of software myself to test these concepts and theories. Its like being in college continuously!

Of late, I’ve been reading a lot about cloud computing, SAAS, REST and web2.0. But I couldn’t find a way to test them. So I decided to develop an application, which I named YATSY – Yet Another Ticketing System – utilizing years of experience in customizing other helpdesk, support desk and service desk systems.

Only Google offered a free hosting (limited free hosting; with an option to upgrade) on the cloud. With its current offering Google AppEngine (GAE) supports only Python. And web2py, a python web-framework, makes it extremely easy to develop for GAE. Not only that – web2py claims to make it easy to build stand-alone applications for all the three platforms: Mac, Linux & Windows. Though web2py doesn’t have many contributed 3rd party plug-ins, I went ahead with web2py because of the above feature set.

One more negative about web2py is that it lacks a fine documentation. So it is little difficult for beginners. Yet discussions on their google group compensates for this lack.

With that said, web2py does make web-programming easy and hosting on GAE is even easier. Here is what I’ve been able to achieve.image

You can see it hosted in Google AppEngine. The code is checked in Google Code.

Your comments are welcome.

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Reader Comments

Logged as Agent, clicked in ‘My Cases’ and got:

Internal error
Ticket issued: unknown

#1 
Written By Vinícius on March 8th, 2009 @ 10:05 pm

Hi, Thanks for trying out and taking time to comment too. I have fixed this. Thanks again.

#2 
Written By Joseph Jude on March 14th, 2009 @ 3:36 pm

Hi,
actually web2py is very well documented for such a young project, read the free chapter of the book and if you like download the rest on lulu.com for 10 bucks.

The bokk is about 240 pages and is well done, not exceptionell but well done.

#3 
Written By Marco on March 16th, 2009 @ 4:28 am

I’m intrigued. Any further analysis, experience or opinions on web2py? I’m looking at python for a series of web applications, am a bit put off by RoR, yet ready to move from PHP, ASP, .NET etc.

#4 
Written By Dan on April 13th, 2009 @ 8:33 pm

I am looking into a similar project and probably code one later for our organization. I wanted to know if we can add buttons etc on web pages created.

#5 
Written By Rahul D. on April 29th, 2009 @ 2:48 pm

Rahul: Yes you can change the template and add further elements.

#6 
Written By Joseph Jude on April 29th, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

BTW - the 2nd version of the web2py manual is available in full online; accessible here:

http://www.web2py.com/examples/default/docs

or

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19211452/Web2py-Manual

#7 
Written By yarko on September 3rd, 2009 @ 2:18 am

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