Friday, May 26, 2006

CherryPy is Gone!

When I posted my last missive, my version of Crunchy didn't do everything it should have - but I've now got it to a point where everything apart from exiting works (I've decided to drop support for arbitrary local tutorials for now - see below). So I can now say that CherryPy has been eliminated without any major issues.

The problem with exiting seems to be because HTTP/1.1 has persistent connections, so BaseHTTPServer.HandleRequest never actually returns (I don't really understand the intricacies of HTTP very well though - I should go and read the RFC I guess). I've given the code to Andre - maybe he can spot something to help.

I have some ideas about packaging groups of individual tutorials as "courses" - with additional metadata describing the relationships between tutorials (pages) in the course (see Andrew Harrington's post on the edu-sig list - this is what prompted the idea).

Basically, a course would be encapsulated in a directory (could also some kind of archive, say a zip file), and would have an index file that contained any metadata needed in multiple pages. The individual pages would then be referenced by the index (naturally pages could still link to each other). The index could also define some bijection from page "meta-names" to page files.

I will post my ideas on the edu-sig list once they're more mature.

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