[Twisted-web] Setting up a project.

Phil Mayers p.mayers at imperial.ac.uk
Wed Aug 6 05:27:31 EDT 2008


On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 06:30:23PM -0500, Govind Salinas wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I am trying to set up an application that uses twisted.web for doing
>some ad-hoc serving of data.  If you are familiar with mercurial, what
>i am doing is very similar to the "hg serve" command except it is for
>use with git.
>
>So my question is, how should I compose the project.  The how-tos and
>examples left me not sure of what I should do.  I have something that
>runs and can serve up mako templates, but that is all it can do since
>I am doing everything manually.  I would prefer not to have to code in
>serving things like css pages, 404 pages etc.  I am sure this is
>already in twisted.web somewhere.


You haven't really given enough information.

I presume you're using twisted.web "Resource" classes and http server?

>
>
>Let me give you some information about the set up I have .  Basically
>I have a python program running somewhere.  I will have a default set
>of files that serve the content a particular way.  The default set
>will contain mako templates[1], style sheets and perhaps some images.
>So I need a way to kick off the mako templates based on the URL.  The
>templates may include each other.
>
>Here is the layout
>
>content-dir/
>   __config__.py -- This is a file that currently just sets up the mapping
>                            between a regex that selects a page and a path to
>                            where that page's template is under the 
>                            content-dir
>   main.html -- The html files here are really the mako templates
>   main.css
>   etc...
>
>My server class takes in a template dir, loads the config and starts a
>server.  When it gets a request it matches it against the regexes and
>runs the template.  There should be some initialization that sets up
>objects that get passed to the template (in addition to values from
>the regex parsing). This is all pretty brain-dead code.

Why does it need to be anything more than that? What's wrong with the 
current code?

>
>I was hoping for some guidance on a better strategy for doing this.

Better how?

>Any help would be appreciated.  Bonus points if it is something that
>could easily be re-used on another webserver if someone wanted to host
>this on an existing website.

I don't understand that bit.

>
>I tried to post this before signing up to the list and I was rejected.  I don't
>know if you guys consider that a problem.
>
>[1] I am only using mako because it seems to suit my needs from a
>templating perspective.   If there is something built into twisted
>that will do the job as well, then that would be one less dependency
>that I have.

You probably want to look at the Nevow toolkit which contains:

 * A slightly better application server / resource object hierarhcy on 
top of twisted.web - my understanding is this will eventually be 
backported into twisted.web

 * An XHTML & native-python deferred-aware templating engine

 * An AJAX/COMET server called Athena

A little more detail about what's wrong with the current system would be 
helpful.



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