[Grok-dev] Re: Atom and RSS feeds in Grok

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Brandon Craig Rhodes wrote:
[snip]
> I will first write this extension on a branch of Grok, so that we can
> see what it would look like if it were included in Grok itself.  Because
> it seems to me that syndication will be at least as widely used as, say,
> the REST classes, I will probably advocate that syndication go directly
> into Grok itself.  But if no one else likes that idea, then I can always
> copy the work off into a "megrok.syndication" package later once it's
> working.

Cool that you're working on this. I don't think this is a feature that 
should be integrated in the Grok core at this point in time, though. I'd 
prefer megrok.syndication.

It's a gray area of course, but here are my reasons:

* if we can make something an external library, i.e. if we don't *need* 
to modify Grok core itself to make something work, we should try making 
it a library. We intend to split things off the core in the future, so 
putting in more features is something we should be careful about.

* there are different approaches to do syndication, and have we hit upon 
the final approach? The Grok core is more about codifying general final 
approaches. If we're inventing a new way to do something, we probably 
shouldn't do it in the core. The core is more for making stuff that's 
already available in Zope 3 more easy to use.

* I feel there's a difference between low-level REST, XMLRPC or JSON 
support (different ways to support views and RPCish thing) and support 
for more concrete protocols such as Atom and RSS. There's a gray area of 
course, and syndication leans closer to low level, but I'd still say 
there's a difference. Syndication leans a bit more to a particular 
application.

* You're going to be generating XML. What XML library are you going to 
use? I don't think we should make the core start to depend on, say, 
lxml, though of course there are reasonable XML libraries in the Python 
standard library as well.

You can debate all these reasons. I know as I can too. Still, taken 
together I'd prefer if this was done in an extension. We have pretty 
easy ways to pull in extensions these days too, after all. And we can 
reconsider if things seem reasonable.

Regards,

Martijn