Nevow 0.3!

Nevow 0.3 is now out! Go get it!

There has been a lot of development over the past five months, and I have been feeling overdue for doing a Nevow release for a while now. So finally today I mustered the strength to write all the ChangeLogs, READMEs, and update the examples and documentation needed for a release. And what a release it is. This release encompasses some pretty major refactorings and additions:

• freeform-patterns: This branch rewrote almost all of the freeform form rendering code (now called webform). It makes use of the Nevow pattern/slot paradigm to allow customization of the automatically generated forms down to the finest detail.


• ubiquitous-context: This branch focused on making the Nevow APIs more consistent by passing a context object to the URL traversal APIs. Nevow keeps track of the objects involved in URL traversal and page rendering using a stack of context objects which you can use to make information available to your components.


• LivePage improvements: LivePage is now cross browser! Mozilla, Firefox, WinIE6, and Safari browsers are all supported. Adding support for browsers such as Opera and Konqueror should be possible as long as they support XmlHttpRequest. Also, some python-side APIs were added which make mutating the in-browser DOM a breeze: set, append, alert, and call. All these python-side objects take stan, so you can pass them XML fragments composed using Python code or extracted from XML/XHTML documents. No JavaScript skills required!


• New Fragment class: Fragment is a Page base class which implements just those APIs required to expose data_* and render_* methods in a stan tree. It's now easy to break out your frequently used components into self-contained classes, instantiate and return them from a Page.render_* method or even another Fragment.render_* method.


• url.URL improvements: Some new APIs make it easy to manage view state using query arguments rather than server-side sessions, which expire and aren't friendly with the back button.


• nevow.canvas: In the tradition of LivePage comes the experimental Canvas module, which gives you a server-side Python API for drawing lines, curves, and text in the browser, with control over line thickness, border color, and opacity. Canvas gives you a socket you can keep open as long as you need to draw animations in the client browser.


• XML Compliance: xmlfile and xmlstring now properly retain doctypes, comments, and xmlns attributes.


• IFoo(ctx) syntax: ctx.locate(IFoo) has been deprecated in favor of the more uniform adaption syntax IFoo(ctx).


• WSGI Implementation: This release contains a simple, incomplete WSGI application implementation. It is now possible to use Nevow to render CGI or WSGI pages without Twisted installed.


• guard improvements: guard.SessionWrapper now works properly when it is installed in locations other than the root.


• Chatola: Chatola, the LivePage demonstration application, has bloomed into a fully operational web-based chat server!


• inevow.IQ: The Interface for Querying is the beginnings of a DOM querying API. Currently, it contains only the patternGenerator, onePattern, and allPatterns APIs.

Visit the web site for more information about Nevow.