Tea and Cake

Skunkpad is a little project I’m working on with a good friend of mine Raffe. Skunkpad is essentially a sketching/artwork application for use with drawing tablets such as those produced by Wacom.


Some of our planned features include:

• Collaborative drawing with your friends over the internet.
• Online sync of your raw artwork to your ‘studio’, never lose artwork again!
• Online community of artists able to create new communities and sub-communities, create pages for topics of interest and run community forums and events such as art competitions.
• Comprehensive drawing application, user extensible via LUA, community made filters & brushes.
• Multi-gallery publishing form the application, click to publish finished artwork to popular online galleries.

We already have a small dedicated group of Alpha testers who will be testing our first release in the next week or so. Our aim is to release a limited public beta before Christmas and we are working hard to get to that point ^_^

My focus is on the web application, while Raffe is building the desktop app itself (although the entire process is highly collaborative and we bounce ideas off each other all the time). I’ve been a long time fan of twisted, which is an asynchronous networking framework for python. In previous jobs over the years I’ve reveled in building large scale web apps on the twisted platform.

Without wanting to come off as critical of twisted.web and nevow, because I think they have their place, for this project I wanted to try something a bit lighter on its toes with a quicker development cycle, something a little less ..rigid.

As with any geek diving into a new set of tools I am like a kit at Christmas time, bits of paper going everywhere, running about showing everyone what I’ve found *wraps the pocoo developers up in her tail and hugs them to bits*.

The stack I am using, which is proving just about the right level of already-has-that and can-still-do-my-own-thing-without-any-trouble is NGINX, Gunicorn, Werkzeug, WTForms, Jinja2 & SqlAlchemy on Ubuntu Linux.

While I am keen to review several of these in their own right over time, the combination together with the help of a few decorators to register bits and pieces makes for a very neat and simple way to assemble an application. I’m finding myself writing fewer classes and more functions, with classes being relegated to the more appropriate purpose of modeling data structures, rather than defining complex logic.

I think that it is my need for freedom which this little stack of libraries tickles in me, a freedom which has me rushing home after my day job to dive into code all over again.

-Pomke