Webware for Python

12:06am EST. Time for the day's first msg:

Regarding my earlier problem with passing globals to servlet scripts, I, 
ahem, wasn't thinking clearly.

My print statement was in the super class' script which obviously was 
imported. That explains why it didn't get the globals passed in via 
execfile() and why there were extra globals that made it look like...an import!

-Chuck

Subclasses of Page in methods such as awake(), writeHTML(), etc. have 
access to several objects including the transaction, request, response and 
session.

We had example code that sometimes accessed them via attributes like 
self._request, and at other times via methods like self.request().

Recently Jay improved WebKit to only create session objects on demand, but 
this feature requires the use of the method rather than the attribute. 
Rather than have people try to remember when to use attributes vs. methods 
for these objects, I'm going to encourage coders to always use the methods. 
That allows us to add more "intelligence" later without breaking people's code.

Consequently, I updated all of the WebKit examples to do so which is the 
CVS update I refer to in the subject.


Note that I often do this in my methods:

	req = self.request()

And then use 'req' repeatedly. It saves typing (and I suppose some CPU cycles).

I also do:

	wr = self.writeln
	wr('this')
	wr('that')


-Chuck


P.S. In the future, I think I'll consolidate my "Updates" so people don't 
get so many messages.

PlugInDirs is a new setting in AppServer.config. It is similar to PlugIns, 
but instead of pointing directly to the plug-ins, it lists to directories 
containing plug-ins. Any directory inside, which contains an __init__.py, 
is assumed to be a plug-in and loaded as such by the WebKit app server.

The point here is that by designating a directory for plug-ins, you can 
simply "drop in" plug-ins at the right location and they'll get loaded 
automatically (without having to change the config files).

The default value is ['..'], which means that anything sitting next to 
WebKit, such as PSP, gets loaded.

You can sit your own plug-ins right next to WebKit and they'll load.

You can create an empty file named 'dontload' inside a package/plug-in to 
disable it.

If you have any questions, let me know.


-Chuck

At 04:47 PM 8/2/00 -0700, Graham Hughes wrote:
>Is there a way to use PSP without buying into the rest of Webware?  I
>have my own home grown template library I've been using for the last
>while, and it has come up that people want to butcher my nice templates
>by loading them into GoLive and such; some experimentation has shown
>that ASP syntax is less likely to be butchered out of hand.

Interesting question. Our "stack" of software goes in the opposite 
direction, though. WebKit is on the bottom and PSP is put on top. As it 
stands right now, you would have to run WebKit in "one shot" mode, which is 
like having CGI scripts, or in app server mode.

Jay may have additional comments since he is the primary author of PSP.


>BTW, while I think Webware looks great, I'd rather it get a little more
>mature before I buy into it; the recent memory leaks come to mind.

I've been running in "one shot" mode which eliminates the memory leaks and 
any other long running problems, at the cost of performance. See 
OneShot.cgi & OneShotAdapter.py.

Also, in terms of leakage per day, I think it came down to a few megs which 
doesn't feel very serious. In any case, I believe Jay said that was fixed 
and we'll certainly test for it again before releasing 0.4.

-Chuck