written on Friday, March 18, 2011
What a week this was. Though overshadowed by the recent events in Japan PyCon was an interesting and fun experience for everybody involved. I had a talk about Flask there and overall I was quite happy with it. It was announced as a 45 minute talks by the session runner however it was registered as a 30 minute talk so I had to keep it short in order to get a few questions through.
I also manage to discuss the future of Werkzeug and WebOb with Chris and Ian briefly and we might just do a request/response object library based on both Werkzeug and WebOb over the next couple of months. Though none of this is set in stone yet.
The sprints on Flask themselves were quite successful too. We have an improved extension development documentation now and Flask-SQLAlchemy can connect to multiple databases now. The latter also will have new documentation with the next release.
Flask-Principal did not get enough love yet and other extensions were also not reviewed yet, but there is a good reason for this: our extension testing script does not scale well to many extensions. In order to fix this we now have a Jenkins installation running on a dedicated machine sponsored by Ron DuPlain who will also help out with extension reviewing from now on.
What else? Modules! Flask modules are the one part of Flask I am very unhappy with and it took us a while to find something that solves most of the problems (including the name). So with the next Flask release we will ship a new concept for modules called “Blueprints”. Essentially what these blueprints will do is capturing construction information. You can then attach these blueprints to applications (even multiple times if you like). They can either extend the application itself or are registered with their own name. I will soon have a working implementation of them in a branch on github, so stay tuned.