[Twisted-web] HTTP-AUTH for web2 / Kudos on web2's operation

[James Y Knight]

On Nov 16, 2005, at 4:34 AM, glyph at divmod.com wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:05:09 -0500, "Clark C. Evans"  
> <cce at clarkevans.com> wrote:
>
>
>> 1.  It would be delightful if WebContext had a request()
>>     helper method that did the appropriate adaptation
>>     to an IRequest
>>
>
> It would be even nicer if WebContext went away entirely, since the  
> only thing anyone ever does with it is retrieve the request.

I think I agree that it should be removed from web2, as its nesting  
features are pretty much not necessary, and that accounts for most of  
the complexity. The only concern I have is of where users will store  
per-request data (what to replace it with). In twisted.web, Request  
was a Componentized. In Nevow, they currently have ctx. If you remove  
both these possibilities, what then? JP argues that users should not  
store per-request data associated with the request, but rather,  
somewhere else handwavy depending on the circumstances. I don't know  
that I believe him.

I think of something like parsing user authentication information at  
a high level up in the resource tree and making it available to a  
Resource low in the tree. It is fairly clearly a per-request bit of  
state which may be useful to a some subset of the pages, and as such  
seems like it should be attached to the Request. Just going and  
adding random attributes onto Request is not nice thing to do, so  
I'll pretend I didn't just consider it. But it really seems like some  
designated storage spot for extra data is necessary.

James