I’ve always been proud about how lazy I am. I often say that I will do an incredible amount of work just so I can be lazy. Something along those lines happened today, and I realize that what it is is that I hate is routine busywork; so much so that I would rather do a certain quantity of creative work to avoid an equal quantity of busywork.

At my company, we have used Apple’s deprecated WebObjects 4.5, which uses Objective-C and WebScript. Years ago, WO4.5 was the most fun web development environment, but since it turned 5.0 and substituted Java for Objective-C, it’s been much less fun and it’s not used very widely outside Apple, and it’s not really admired as much as it used to be. It’s gotten worse (Java over WebScript? Get real) and other environments have gotten better (I like Django a lot right now).

Anyway, we have a specific application that has been bothering us for a long time, and it’s time to port it.

I’ve been looking at “SQLAlchemy”, a Python-based object-relational modeling tool that works with Oracle (which I hate, but that’s a story for another time). It seems using this tool will make the port from WO4.5 to Python a fair bit easier.

The first step seemed to be to create new model files that describe the object-relational mapping. Of course, the syntax for these files (pure Python, it turns out) is quite different from the syntax used in WO’s EOF object-relational mapping layer. We have a lot of objects, so rather than do it by hand, I thought I would write a tool to do it.

EOF uses a plist file format. There are Objective-C routines to read these files, but I couldn’t find any libraries to do so in Python. So I installed pyobjc so I could use one particular Objective-C call from Python. This made parsing very easy, and creating the Python model file was a piece of cake.

It’s not 100% yet, but I was quite amazed not only how quickly I could produce the translation tool, but what great lengths I would go to to be lazy.