Quixote: An Introduction

Andrew J. Todd esq

http://www.halfcooked.com/

Quixote in 5 Bullet Points

• A Pythonic Web Framework
• Simple
• URLs map to Python objects
• Works with most web servers
• There is no point number five

Quixote in 2 More Bullet Points

• Optional templating language (PTL)
• Optional form toolkit

URLs map to Python objects

• Functions can return response streams (of HTML)
• Packages (directories)
• Modules (.py files)
• _q_index() if an object isn't callable this is invoked
• Class instances
• _q_lookup() if an attribute isn't found this is invoked.

Python Templating Language

Rather than add Python like syntax to HTML just let Python return HTML

      def footer [html] ():
          # Literals are appended to the output
          '<p>Page generated at ' 
          # Expressions are evaluated
          time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M", time.gmtime()) 
          # Then back to literals
          '</p>'
      

Further Reading

• Quixote Web Site at http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote
• Quixote.ca set up by Andrew Kuchling (AMK), one of the original Quixote developers. Contains tutorials and the official wiki.
• Developing Web Applications with Quixote, a presentation by AMK