IsWheatForMe

Should I use wheat?

Short answer: probably not yet, unless you want to help implement a programming language and/or do early stage testing. Certain components or related efforts, like TinyTemplateForJava or TinyTemplateForCPlusPlus, are much closer to being in a finished and/or usable state. The Wheat language itself is in a state where you can develop a web site using it, but there are missing features, missing documentation, and missing infrastructure (mailing lists, bug-trackers, etc).

How much disk space will I need?

Well, at the moment my checked out tree is 50MB, but that includes debugging symbols, source code, and other things which you may or may not need. It's really too early to give a particularly good answer to this: various things could be stripped out, but other things are likely to be added as wheat continues to be developed.

Will it work at my $10/month hosting account

Well, to run wheat as it exists now requires the ability to compile and run a program which can listen on a network port (chances are, the average hosting account doesn't operate this way, at least with respect to connections from the internet). The current implementation is a web server in and of itself, not something that can run as a CGI, FastCGI∞, apache module, or the like. The vision for wheat is that the server holds data in memory which can last longer than a web request, so CGI probably wouldn't be too promising. I'm not sure I'd rule out FastCGI∞ or an apache module, unless there is some problem I haven't thought of yet (although of course no one has worked on this yet). You don't need to be root (although many systems will only let you listen on ports above 1024).

Do I need Dreamweaver?

No. If any of our pages refer to Dreamweaver, it is just as an example. You can substitute anything which lets you write HTML, including a basic text editor like vi, emacs, or BBEdit. in essence (almost) anything you are using right now to write HTML should work.

What does wheat source code look like?

We don't yet have a tutorial which starts with hello world and goes from there, but we do have real running wheat source code which we can show you. See blog.ws∞ (and see StoriesForR1 which might give a bit more context about what this very simple blog application can do and what it cannot (yet) do).

Why did you bother writing this page?

Well, someone wrote a version of these questions, and all of them seemed to be worth answering. There was one miscellaneous comment at the end, suggesting Perl's Template Toolkit (the Template module), or CGI::Application along with HTML::Template and CGI::Session. JimKingdon wasn't familiar with that system until now, but it would seem to differ from our TinyTemplateEngine in that it (like JSP and PHP and velocity∞ and many others), puts logic into the templates. The TinyTemplateEngine, by contrast, keeps the template as much like an HTML page as possible, with only some minimal markup to show where to substitute into it. The logic which describes how the page is to be expanded is (almost entirely) in a program which is separate from the template. As it says earlier on this page, if you like that idea and you want to use it for a web site today, you are probably better off with TinyTemplateForJava or TinyTemplateForCPlusPlus. Not that we think TinyTemplateForWheat is somehow impractical, but it is just farther from being ready for production use.