Went to the Web Frameworks Night tonight to learn a bit more about some of the most interesting framework projects. As creator and sole hacker on InfoCMS and as somebody who realises how silly it is to reinvent the wheel, I thought I owed it to myself (and my clients) to show up and learn some stuff.

The three frameworks presented where Catalyst, Django and the now quite famous Ruby On Rails. Each was interesting, I arrived late for the Catalyst talk and was least interested in it due to it’s Perliness. Django was what I really wanted to learn about, but it was also interesting to listen to Matt Biddulph discussing Rails development. We also got to see inside the in-development BBC programme catalogue app, which knows all about pretty much every show the BBC has done since 1936. That alone was worth the bike-ride.

As I said it was Django that I wanted to know more about. Django is Python, full stack, has a nice OR-mapper and lots of bits of pieces that I have or have tried to build into InfoCMS. It doesn’t have Rails or Zope 3’s test-driven development, which is a big blow. It doesn’t have XSLT as an output layer or much in the way of TTW tools for building sites as far as I could see. Test-driven development is something which I’ve totally failed to bring into InfoCMS, but the other two are core goals. However, though Django may lack some core things I want from InfoCMS, it does seem to have a very similar set of goals. Minimal code, maximal reuse. High level of component sharing and nice things like automatically generated admin interfaces, Ajax, etc.

They’ve all got bloody template languages though! Gah.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking I’d like to rebuild InfoCMS from the ground up in Python for a while. It’s a pipe-dream because I’ll never get the time, what with running two start-ups and that. However, I could steal a third or half of the code I need from Django :-). Both the website and Simon stressed it’s modular nature. Don’t like the view layer, throw it out. Simon also said that they’re not afraid of breaking backwards compatibility and that as they’ve only been open source since July, now is a good time to get involved and potentially shape the project dramatically. I might just do that.

The after party pub mission was also really interesting. I got talking to this guy, an alumnus of Media Lab, Berkeley and Ludicorp! Every cool idea I threw at him he bounced back without even trying. He referred to Cal and Tim by first name. He’s consulting at Sony on generative stuff and toys for Playstation etc. I talked about Generator X and the generative art scene, he knows Casey Raes. He mentioned mixing and mash-up tools on Playstation, I counter with Ableton Live, Sony are working with them. I mentioned an interesting new book, Rules of Play, it was written by his old business partner. It was a funny conversation. Mainly because he was a really nice and down to earth guy, at the same time as being a name geek, just back from OSCON. It was pretty exciting to be honest.