I’ve managed to get sycaless installed on a development machine! Woo-hoo. :-)I think the subversion trunk I checked out might have been unstable as I had to track down a bunch of odd bugs, but I did eventually get the wiki running again. There is still a lot I’m not interested in so I’m going to continue removing more stuff for now, and then I’ll get an idea of how everything is setup and what I like and don’t like about the architecture and design. One of the bugs I wrestled with was due to ampersands in query strings used to serve files. I don’t know why on earth developers continue to create web servers on top of web servers! It opens up so many problems for a pretty simple task in itself. The most obvious security risk being that someone would put in an alternate path to a private file, and if the security settings on the system aren’t correct, it could be a gaping hole. Although it appears that sycamore doesn’t suffer from this entirely, it is definitely something I’m going to remove. I realize many web developers are using interpreted languages like python, ruby and php to build web servers and web applications in one, but I’m not buying into that. I prefer to use Apache 2 with FastCGI and am warming up to mod_wsgi with python.

Sycaless is a personal fork of the Sycamore project that I can pick apart as a learning project to understand how it works better, as well as learn more about python. If you are interested in sycaless, I’d instead recommend checking out sycamore instead for now.