Reusable Django Apps And Introducing Tabula Rasa

The excellent 42 Topics blog has a post entitled Popularizing Django — Or Reusable apps considered harmful which makes (or attempts to make) the case for packaged apps over reusable apps.

He raises some good points, although of course the packaged apps he's talking about still use reusable apps so he's not actually talking about there being a problem with reusable apps per se, just that there should be packaged apps as well.

I mentioned the django-hotclub group in a comment on that post as I'd really like the discussion to take place there.

I also, in that comment, mention something I'm working on tentatively called Tabula Rasa. (I'm toying with a Greek name rather than Latin but something tells me people are more comfortable with tabula rather than grammateion)

Basically, the goal of Tabula Rasa is an out-of-the-box Django-based website with everything but the domain-specific functionality.

So far it's just my new django-email-confirmation app tied together with password change and reset, login/logout, with the beginnings of a tab-style UI. There's a ton more I want to refactor out of my existing websites to put into it as well as adding support for OpenID and the stuff I'm starting to do for django-friends.

Even if one doesn't use Tabula Rasa as the starting point of a website, I'm hoping it will prove very useful for another goal, namely a "host" project to develop and tryout reusable apps.

One of the challenges I know I've always had with writing or trying out reusable apps is the need for a project to provide the scaffolding.

So Tabula Rasa will hopefully serve that dual purpose.

The initial code is available at http://code.google.com/p/django-hotclub/ under /trunk/projects/tabularasa

I hope to have a running instance online soon.

UPDATE: I've decided to switch to the Greek word pinax suggested below by Orestis Markou.

Syndicated 2008-05-06 05:49:35 (Updated 2008-05-09 23:18:45) from James Tauber