So Anders Pearson made a very small application called Tasty that does tagging. Well, I don't know how small it is, but it's a kind of partial application, in that the application alone speaks only JSON; it's only interesting when coupled with other applications. Which (as he actually mentions) is just the kind of application I was talking about in my post on little apps.

It also brings up the issue: how do you make a system of little applications workable? From a SQLObject search RSS feed I came upon this Plone post where Tasty is mentioned, and the idea of porting it to an alternate backend to make it easier for Zope/Plone people to use (it's currently a TurboGears app).

I, of course, would propose that instead they (for some vague definition of "they" that could include any number of people) should make it easy to embed the application into Zope. I don't think it needs to be a lot of work:

• Make CherryPy applications well behaved WSGI applications, so that multiple such applications can easily live in the same process, and so that programmatic configuration is easy. This requires changes to CherryPy itself, so this is perhaps the hardest step.
• Make a Zope WSGI Server Product (it's a server because it makes Zope a server/container for other WSGI applications). This shouldn't be hard programming. The only hard part that I see is how to specify what Python function (or instance) to call. Paste Deploy is one way to do that; other ways are possible, maybe just adding a set of key/value pairs to the product instance's properties, which would actually be nicely complimentary to Paste Deploy configuration files, which are just the same thing in a text file.
• After those are done everything should work, but to clean it up make it easy to build specialized Products that build on the WSGI Product, so that a Tasty Product will have its own name and constrained configuration. I bet you could make this doable with like one text file and one update to the setup.py file. Maybe one other Python file is required, but only maybe.
• Use Zope Basket for all the products, since TurboGears and Tasty are already eggs, and entry points are a nice way for the WSGI Product to find applications. It's an easy fit.

With these things in place it could be possible for every TurboGears application -- and Wareweb, Pylons, and other frameworks -- to be instantly available to all Zope users, only an easy_install away. And none of what I've described requires radical rethinking or rewriting of anything.

I think that's a whole lot more interesting and useful than reimplementing and forking a working application in order to change frameworks and backends.