by Brandon Rhodes • Home

Grok has book. Book good!

Date: 10 June 2010
Tags:books, computing, grok, python, zope

I little suspected the great chasm that lies between the simple act of agreeing to review a book, and the actual exercise of sitting down later to write the review. It feels quite pleasant, really, to jot off a positive reply to the publisher's polite question. One feels magnanimous for agreeing to help advance our civilization by reviewing a book about Python, and for helping out the publisher in what, after all, are such hard economic times. It is fun when the free copy arrives, crisp and smartly bound.

But then, eventually, one has to write the actual review.

And so, a full four months after that friendly email from Packt Publishing, it is time that I sit down and put together some thoughts about Carlos de la Guardia's first book, Grok 1.0 Web Development. Carlos is a long-time veteran of the Zope and Plone communities, and Grok, of course, is the web framework that places a simple and agile convention-driven engine atop the otherwise notoriously XML-ridden Zope application framework. Grok is an important project, because it packages the technology of Python's oldest and most experienced community of web developers in a way that makes it easy to extend and use.

First, one notices that the book does exhibit the kind of typos for which Packt are well known; but not so many, in this case, as to distract me from the text. The book tackles increasingly complicated topics in roughly the same order as every book in the web development genre: first installation, then views, models, forms, and so forth. But even here one notices an initial difference! Because this is the land of Zope, the search engine chapter appears quite early in the book — in Chapter 6, in fact. While some web frameworks can only support search through the installation of a special database extension, or perhaps through an entirely separate third-party application, Grok comes with search already integrated into its object database. This lets the concept be introduced early as a natural part of the framework, rather than being a difficult exercise in product integration best left for after the user has learned deployment.

Not that third-party products are bad! In fact, I am happy to see that in many cases Carlos teaches his readers to use them. Barely twenty pages into the book, the new developer is being taught about using virtualenv to maintain an installation of Python packages; and near the end, Carlos teaches deployment using the modern and sleek mod_wsgi module. Some books feel myopically focused on one software community; this one, instead, feels expansive, a place where best practices from all across the Python ecosystem meet.

It is particularly notable that at one point Carlos steps outside of Zope entirely and, for an entire chapter, describes how Grok integrates support for relational databases through SQLAlchemy, Python's most outstanding ORM. This both reflects credit upon the flexibility of Grok — whose abstractions must be working extremely well to build atop an entirely different database model, one that is not even native to Zope — and it evidences Carlos's determination to teach a very wide set of skills in his book. In fact, he even goes in the other direction at one point, and teaches the interested developer how to use the ZODB without Grok in case they want to access it from another application!

The book tends to be quite clear in what it explains, but it sometimes feels as though a few more side trips in its examples would be welcome — it was not always clear to me whether a beginner, after plowing through an example, would understand what alternatives Carlos faced at each step, and why Carlos chose to build the solutions in the way he did.

Though the book does cover testing, it is not test driven — testing is confined to its own chapter near the end of the book, rather than motivating the design of each sample application. A more interesting omission is that the book says nothing about web services, despite the fact that XML-RPC and REST are two things that Grok does particularly well! A chapter on building web APIs would be a great subject for a second edition of this book, especially if it then proceeded to show how easily Grok can support the Ajax design pattern.

It did strike me as decidedly old-fashioned that Carlos repeats the weary canard that the Zope template language's awkwardness and verbosity are worth it, because it allows your templates to remain valid HTML, because your designers might, at any moment, want to open up and tweak a raw template in their browsers! This, of course, only works if your templates are each an entire page — if you fail to avail yourself, in other words, of any of the power of the macros, slots, and viewlets that Carlos goes on to describe later. And, in fact, many of his later templates are indeed mere un-styled HTML snippets that no designer in their right mind would view in isolation. All of which leads to the question of why Genshi, another template language popular with Grok developers, does not warrant any mention in the book — especially since the book in so many other cases is careful to mention more widely deployed Python technologies that Grok is able to use.

Finally, I can attest that a concept I never managed to learn when I was active with Grok — the tangle of concepts that surround viewlets, viewlet managers, layers, and skins — became quite clear as I sat down and read Chapter 8 in close detail. On the one topic which I could truly approach as a newcomer, therefore, I found Carlos's approach to be very direct and understandable.

Grok has good online documentation, but unless you are already an experienced developer you will have difficulty putting the pieces together into a story that runs smoothly from model to view to deployment. If you need help getting the whole picture of how Grok apps fit together, you will certainly want this book. You can purchase it from either Amazon or directly from its publisher, Packt Publishing.

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