Python Desktop Server Weblog 22.2.2004

TooFPy 0.3.2 released

Toolserver Framework For Python 0.3.2 was released. It brings several bugfixes in the area of asynchronous computation (triggering computations in the background) and implements (and corrects previous implementations) of transactional hooks. These transactional hooks allow you to easily integrate with transaction mechanisms of your database - just write three hooks and if your tool code throws an exception, the database transaction will automatically roll back! Other changes are better charset support, removed timeouts at start time, several fixes and speedups to the request handling and expanded infrastructure (for example there is now a ~/.Toolserver/lib path to put libraries into).

Another important change is the dependency on SOAPpy 0.11.1 (and fpconst 0.6.0) in TooFPy. You must upgrade your SOAPpy installation, as TooFPy is not compatible with older versions any more due to changes in some inner APIs in SOAPpy!

New Beta 0.7.1: many enhancements

This release is a somewhat weird release: it's not really finished. I tried to rewrite the internal threading architecture for this release, but that went wrong - I hit a wall with some weird problems with Metakit that resulted in PyDS segfaulting. So I threw out some of the new code and implemented a simpler scheme. Result is a very stable PyDS again, but currently the threading model is suboptimal. As a result, you will hit a small performance penalty when accessing PyDS the first time after a longer period of inactivity due to the main worker thread shutting down (intentionally!) after an inactivity timeout. So if you don't need the new features, you might want to stay with 0.7.0 - I needed to release 0.7.1 because of interdependencies with other projects (TooFPy in this case) and the reliance on SOAPpy 0.11.1.

The reliance on SOAPpy 0.11.1 (and fpconst 0.6.0) requires you to upgrade your SOAPpy installation - PyDS 0.7.1 (and TooFPy 0.3.2) is not compatible with SOAPpy 0.10.1 any more, due to changes in some inner API of SOAPpy!

Now on to the new features and fixes. There are many, so read them in the changelog. But there are some highlights:

• the WeblogTool now has a default Blogmarklet linked, as does the BlogmarkTool
• SilverCity is used to allow code-blocks as written in P201
• the new ArchiveTool gives you compact posting archives across all supported tools
• strict structured text now allows to better write pure reST pages, as there is no interference with cheetah macro code (no special handling for the # char anymore). To allow use of many tools, you have special directives to link images, pictures, macros and nuggets.
• speedups due to less locking, usage of cStringIO instead of string concatenation in the aggregator and several other enhancements. Besides this weird leftover from my threading reworking, PyDS is now quite fast! (and the delay will go away with 0.7.2, at least that's planned)