Python Secret Weblog for 2008 June 3 (entry 0)

Tue Jun 03 2008 14:19 Grok Status Update Part 2:

I continue yesterday's status update with some more topics. Lots of stuff is going on in the Grok world!

grokproject improvements

Maurits van Rees, Tim Terlegård, Reinout van Rees and others at the Grokkerdam sprint worked on improving grokproject in many ways:

• improve paster integration
• less questions asked and better defaults
• less different URLs are involved when installing grokproject the first time, as we now have the ability to bundle a lot of eggs in a big file, lowering the chance of the installation failing because some site we pull in an egg from happens to be down.

After the sprint, Maurits continued to work on z3c.recipe.eggbasket, which should make this easy to manage for developers and release managers. All this is coming to you in Grok 0.13, if not earlier in an interim grokproject release.

megrok.kss

Godefroid Chapelle, Jeroen Vloothuis, Jean-Paul Ladage and others worked on polishing off KSS support in Grok, in the form of the Grok extension megrok.kss. KSS is a powerful, declarative way of doing AJAX in the form of something very much like a CSS sheet.

KSS actions have now become views on views, which seems to be a good place, as KSS actions actually typically apply to the view itself (on the browser-side, so HTML). Documentation on KSS was also extended, and some discussions were started about the KSS APIs. Jeroen switched over the extension to use KSS's new base library, kss.base with Grok, so we're up to speed on the latest and greatest KSS.

the url method

Thanks to the work done by Peter Bengtsson and Jan-Jaap Driessen at the Grokkerdam sprint, the url method on views now has an extra optional parameter, data, which can be passed a dictionary with query parameters.

A test coverage analysis and a bug report showed there were still problems with the support of the url method in viewlets and viewlet managers. This led to some discussions as to how fix viewlets. Work is being done to fix this on a branch by Jan-Wijbrand Kolman.

megrok.responseheaders

Peter Bengtsson (and I know others worked with him, but I now forget who.. sorry!) worked at the Grokkerdam sprint to develop a package called megrok.responseheaders. This is a nice example of how Grok can be extended with new directives for existing views. It adds two new directives, http_content_type and http_cache_control. These can be added to view classes to control view content type and cache control information.

Right now it's only available in SVN, here, as it is based on some changes made in a newer version of our Martian configuration library. Once Grok 0.13 is released, it'll need a bit of polishing and can be released.