[Grok-dev] making Grok work with toppcloud

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Ian Bicking has something new: toppcloud:

http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/01/29/new-way-to-deploy-web-apps/

Deploying Grok applications quickly ("to the cloud", or just to a single 
server) is something I've been wishing for for a while. It would be 
interesting to see whether we can find a way to deploy Grok applications 
with toppcloud.

The biggest immediate stumbling block is that toppcloud (for interesting 
design reasons, read the blog entry) doesn't allow building on the 
server. For binaries you need to install an Ubuntu .deb. For everything 
else, from what I see so far, you just need to copy over Python code.

Another issue that might come up is that "all file paths must be 
relative as they can be moved around". I'm not *sure* that is a problem 
for us, as I don't fully understand it, but it's interesting.

Besides that, I think we're okay, as Grok can function as a WSGI 
application, which is what toppcloud needs.

A way I can see to integrate this with buildout would be to create a 
buildout recipe that can install a Grok application stand-alone as a 
WSGI application. zc.sourcerelease would be something to look at.

This application can then be copied over to toppcloud using the 
toppcloud tools. We'd also need to provide .deb packages for all the 
not-pure-Python code that Grok relies on (the ZODB, zope.interface, and 
a few others).

Anyway, I've only barely looked into this. I just wanted to point this 
out in case someone feels like volunteering.

Regards,

Martijn