New Stuff in Werkzeug (and the WSGI World)
Unfortunately I’m very busy lately so there are few updates on Werkzeug and all the other libraries I personally contributed (and there are even some patches in my Mail queue I have to apply after reviewing) but that doesn’t mean that there is no progress :-)
There is actually quite a lot of new stuff between the 0.1 release and now. Werkzeug tries to implement stupid stuff you reimplement in every second application in a way that you can use it with minor modifications in your application. Because many of those features only come up if you have implemented them often in your own applications they didn’t make it into 0.1. Thanks to all the early adopters we now have cool new stuff that was implemented because there was need for it.
For example Werkzeug now has RFC-compliant Etag and Cache-Control parsing. You can also generate etags automatically for responses and make them conditional for some requests. The utility module was extended with many new stuff that fix limitations in the standard library or implement long missed functions like finding modules in a package (very useful if you want to automatically register controllers), importing modules by a string (useful if your URL map endpoints are (partial) import paths), generating URLs like trac does by calling an Href object, functions to fix URLs similar to the way Firefox fixes them, dumping and parsing HTTP dates, loading and dumping cookies with a simple function call (and support for http only) and probably a lot more before the actual 0.2 release.
Another cool thing is (unrelated to Werkzeug) that more and more cool modules come up that make web development a charm. While babel is available for quite a while I haven’t really used it until last weak and it’s really great. Together with Werkzeug’s routing system and the ability to do multiple inheritance in SQLAlchemy there are so cool ways to do web development of internationalized applications. I know the last sentence doesn’t make sense without the context, so I guess I have to blog about that. sooo freaking cool.
Form handling in Python is still a bit strange if you are not using django’s newforms (I know that there is formencode but somehow it isn’t what I’m looking for) but there is now WTForms which looks promising. With some more small changes it could become a very cool form handling system (for example I’m missing some default validators at the moment and I’m not completely sure how to pass choices to a select box in a per form instance basis). WTForms was derived from an application that is already in production so it solves already many problems nicely. It’s a library I want to watch closely the next weeks.
And I think that approach should become the way Werkzeug is developed in the future. Implement features a release earlier and mark them as “under consideration” if they are not yet used in production applications. If you adopt them early you can give feedback and we can improve it to the next Werkzeug release and streamline the API.
What’s to do until the next Werkzeug release? Georg is currently working on making the sphinx documentation builder independent from the CPython documentation so that other projects can use it too. I then want to semi-automatically build an API documentation for Werkzeug and combine them with hand written rst pages for the Werkzeug 0.2 documentation. I got some feedback for the Werkzeug docs and looks like they are a bit too chaotic and misleading. Especially getting started with Werkzeug is still too complicated so I hope we can address this with a new documentation that combines automatically generated documentation with tutorials.
The documentation tool could probably be useful for other projects too, I guess Georg will drop some lines in his blog once it’s ready.
Updates regarding Jinja will be up shortly, there is currently a branch developed by Lakin Wecker to speed up Jinja template evaluation. And if you already know what GHRML/XAML will gonna be: I will try to get that running this weekend.
That’s it for the moment ;-)