Blue Sky On Mars

I neglected to mention a useful resource for people following TurboGears somewhat more loosely than our busy mailing list: Planet Turbogears was set up last week by Lee McFadden. That gives you one handy place to go to follow bloggers that talk about TurboGears.

Robert “FuManChu” Brewer goes in-depth on URL-rewriting in CherryPy 2.1. This is some documentation I wish I had a couple weeks ago. Robert sums up which aspects of mounting apps at arbitrary points are broken:

1. Generating URL’s to spit back out in HTML. Broken. I now have to manually provide prefix to my HTML templates, or take on the nightmare of making every generated URL into a URL which is relative (e.g. “../../otherpage”) to the current one.

2. HTTP Redirects and their targets. Broken. I now have to manually provide prefix to each instance (or use relative URL’s). But I can’t control CherryPy’s redirect instances! For example, when CherryPy tries to redirect index methods by adding a trailing slash to the requested URI, it uses the value of path, which I’ve rewritten.

3. Handler dispatch: not broken.

4. Arbitrary mount points: not broken.

5. Config lookups. Broken? Some other filter which does a config lookup could run their onStartResource method before mine. Since my filter is user-defined, it is forced to run after all of the builtin ones; none of those currently perform config lookups, however. If any of the server.* config entries are specified somewhere other than “global”, then we have the same issue. Finally, what’s to stop a future CP developer from adding more such problems (as they fix other bugs)?

6. Logging: the error.log and access.log will both use the original URI (from requestLine). Broken? or not? One? Both?

I should note that TurboGears has a fix for #1 and #2 on the list, in the form of an included URL generation function that takes the application root into account. #2 is actually only partly fixed by the URL function. CherryPy’s built in trailing slash redirect knows nothing about my little URL function. There’s a ticket open in the TurboGears Trac about static resources in mounted apps that is basically consideration #5 on Robert’s list. I hadn’t looked at the logging aspect of the problem, so I’ll definitely take Robert’s word on the state of it.

No, Die Welt is not doing an expose on the seamy underbelly of TurboGears. (TurboGears doesn’t actually have an underbelly, let alone a seamy one).

Martin Dowideit wrote an article about the US Postal Service for Die Welt and found my blog posting about the delivery of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from earlier in the year. It looks like I’m the “human interest” portion of the article which is a general overview of where the USPS stands and the challenges it faces.

For those actually in Germany and holding a copy of today’s Die Welt, you can find the article on page 16. Martin was kind enough to send a PDF of the page so I can see how it appears for those of you over there.

This is a minor update to TurboGears, including 3 project upgrades and a fix. The use of setuptools 0.6a6 means that it should now be much easier to do a non-root installation of TurboGears on Unix-like systems.

Here’s the changelog entry:

0.8a4 (October 25, 2005)

Project Updates

• setuptools 0.6a6
• CherryPy 2.1 final
• MochiKit 1.0

Fixes

• On some servers, TurboGears can take a minute to start answering
  connections due to the way the OS handles incoming connections to
  ports that have nothing listening on them.

Bob Ippolito has just released MochiKit 1.0! Congrats, Bob! As he says on his blog, MochiKit was 1.0 quality from the first release, and there’s been a lot of great work on the project since then. MochiKit 1.0 will be included in TurboGears 0.9 0.8a4.

A hearty congratulations to Ian Landsman for shipping HelpSpot 1.0. I feel a kinship with Ian because he started UserScape about the same time that I started Blazing Things. He and I have been exchanging email periodically all year, and he’s a great guy who knows his stuff. Shipping a beta is exciting, but shipping 1.0 is the ultimate!

Today marked an interesting milestone. TurboGears’ Google Group now has 453 members (up about 100 in the past week), which gives it more members than cherrypy-users! Google has upped the traffic category to “medium”, so another 141 people have wisely chosen to sign up for the announcements list.

Given the fast growth and the size of the list, I find myself answering a lot of questions about TurboGears. According to Google, so do bonono, Elvelind, Ian Bicking, Jeff Watkins, Bob Ippolito and Phillip Eby. There are a few people who are also active on IRC (#turbogears at freenode).

In don’t-repeat-yourself style, I try to avoid answering the same question twice. There have been quite a few documentation updates that have sprung out of mailing list exchanges, and I’ll definitely keep that going. (The “comment on this page” links in the site have also been good at catching things! There’s been a number of good Trac tickets since I added that.)

Some of the questions are harder questions, because there are some things that TurboGears is perfectly capable of, but there’s no “standard way” to do it. The plan for the upcoming 0.9 release is to answer a few of the biggest no “standard way” questions. With the commentary and the code contributions that are coming in, things are looking good.

If you’ve ever had a “why can’t a web framework do this for me” sort of question, now’s a good time to pose it to the list. It just may be that the answer is TurboGears 0.9.

It doesn’t yet show up on the front page, but if you look at the CherryPy downloads, you see that CherryPy 2.1 is out! Congrats to the CP team!

I’ve changed the svn version of TurboGears to use CherryPy 2.1 final, so TurboGears users will automatically get the update with 0.9.

Also of note, Ronald Jaramillo has released CatWalk 0.9 and has produced a spiffy survey application tutorial. Good work, Ronald!

Because I’m behind on my reading, I hadn’t heard about the Kinkless GTD system for OmniOutliner. I had already been organizing myself via OmniOutliner, but Kinkless looks much slicker than the route I was taking. If you’re into GTD and OmniOutliner, this is something you should really see!

I don’t have any statistics to share on this, but something that has just occurred to me is that there have been several instances over the past couple of weeks where people have mentioned that they’re new to Python while they’re asking questions about TurboGears.

Python has been my language of choice for a decade, and I’m happy to be contributing in some way to growing Python’s usage.