Teaching While You Work: Webob, Django, and App Engine

I have two interesting tasks on my hands.

1. Write clear code, suitable for teaching.

2. Write a usable -- functioning and secure -- loan-management system.


At the same time, of course.  Otherwise I'd just get my kluge hat on.

It's all going on app engine, of course.  You think I want to do auth myself?


I looked at two tools: WebOb and Django.

Django is a full-stack database-driven framework.

WebOb is a wrapper for WSGI environments.

I decided to use WebOb for two reasons, one for each of my tasks:

1.  WebOb is simple.  It requires no regex url matching, and no black magic import statements.
WebOb does what you call it to do, nothing more.

2.  Django dosen't get along with App Engine.  If I used Django, I would have to use the Django-nonrel fork, or this lengthy patch.  Further, Django has its own auth system, which would take teasing to use with App Engine.