Last weekend I put together some pretty useful code that converts [CouchDB's external process](http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/ExternalProcesses) JSON request/responses to a WSGI compliant interface.

This means you should be able to run any modern Python web framework in an external process

The simplest example:

#!/usr/bin/python
import couchdb_wsgi
 
def application(environ, start_response):
    start_response('200 Ok', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
    return ['Hello World']
 
couchdb_wsgi.CouchDBWSGIHandler(application).run()

But a far more interesting example is running a django app

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys
import couchdb_wsgi
 
django_project = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'mysite')
sys.path.append(django_project)
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'mysite.settings'
 
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
 
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
 
couchdb_wsgi.CouchDBWSGIHandler(application).run()

All the code is [up on github](http://github.com/mikeal/couchdb-wsgi) and I’ve written up some solid [Sphinx docs that are up on gh-pages](http://mikeal.github.com/couchdb-wsgi/). I also pushed an [initial release to PyPI](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/couchdb-wsgi).

So much good stuff landed in Windmill over the last few weeks that we decided to push another major release.

The biggest new features are:

* [django management command](http://trac.getwindmill.com/wiki/WindmillAndDjango) for running windmill tests ([Jacob](http://jacobian.org/) said the existing django support wasn’t good enough and I agreed so I wrote this during the PyCon Sprints)
* new [nose plugin](http://trac.getwindmill.com/wiki/BookChapter-5-RunningTests#RunningTestsfromNose)
* cygwin support contributed by [Simon Law](http://sfllaw.livejournal.com/) (he went and wrote an implemenation of [winreg for cygwin](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cygwinreg) to get this to work).

There were also some really good bug fixes that landed:

* much better unicode handling and serialization (adam)
* fix for POST to foreign domains ([Anthony Lenton](http://anthony.lenton.com.ar))
* continued improvements to click simulation (adam)

The release is [up on PyPI](http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/windmill) and you can install/update with:

$ easy_install -U windmill

For anyone interesting in working **on** windmill we’re having a Sprint in #windmill on irc.freenode.net tomorrow April 8th, 2008 for pretty much all day. We’re going to be improving the unittests for Windmill itself.

The next planned major release will be 1.2 which will include the much anticipated SSL support, courtesy of some great work being done by Anthony.

Just in time for PyCon we’re releasing [Windmill 1.0](http://www.getwindmill.com/archives/412). It’s been almost 3 years of development and I’m both excited and relieved to have something we’re comfortable calling 1.0.

The latest RCs have seen bigger improvements than we thought would make it. A new wave of contributions has given us some great new features in Django support and test serialization and [Adam](http://www.adamchristian.com) has done some great UI work as well.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the release and I hope to see many of you at PyCon. Adam is doing a [talk on windmill](http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/9/) which I’ll be helping out with and Adam and I will also be on a [functional testing tools panel](http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/88/) which should be a lot of fun. And if you’re staying around for the sprint days of the conference we’ll be leading a [windmill sprint](http://us.pycon.org/2009/sprints/projects/windmill/).

It’s usually a good idea to document cool features you write and tell people about them. I totally forgot about this one, which I wrote during DjangoCon a few months back.

A few years ago I wrote a patch for live server support in Django. The patch fell out of sync with trunk and was picked up a year or so later and substantially improved. But the patch didn’t end up making it in for 1.0 . Luckily the code is simple enough that I was able to use it windmill and add live server support to any Django 1.0 install by dynamically overriding and changing the classes that we need to start and stop a live test server for you django project.

After it’s all said and done this makes it dirt simple to bootstrap windmill tests from your Django unittests, all you need to do is define a single test class along side your other django unittests pointing to the directory of windmill tests you want to run and which browser you want to run them in and windmill’s django support will automatically start a live django server and run your windmill tests against it.

from os import path
from windmill.authoring import djangotest 
 
class WindmillTests(djangotest.WindmillDjangoUnitTest):
    test_dir = path.join(path.dirname(path.abspath(__file__)), 'windmilltests')
    browser = 'firefox'

This is also all written up on a wiki page along with some of the caveats.

I’ve been a bad open source developer. I’ve had some really useful code sitting on my laptop for nearly 8 months now without publishing it. It’s a pretty simple mako plugin for django that makes using mako templates as simple and integrated as django’s regular template system.

A week or so ago I finally got off my ass and put it up, but it took me until today to write proper documentation.

The google code project is here, http://code.google.com/p/django-mako/ .

The documentation is here, http://code.google.com/p/django-mako/wiki/Usage .

Basically all you need to do is enable the middleware and all the Mako lookup stuff is handled for you and you can use new shortcut functions that mimic django’s regular render_to_string and render_to_response functions.

I had the pleasure of attending the very first DjangoCon this last weekend.

I’ve attended a lot of conferences; big conferences, small conferences, very targetted conferences and very broad conferences. I think DjangoCon may have been the best conference I’ve ever been to.

Over the years what I’ve learned to truly value about a conference is; meeting with people in the community, learning and understanding things I care about that would be harder to learn from reading than listening to a speaker, and just generally having a good time. DjangoCon was fantastic on all fronts. Being so targeted (people who use Django) there weren’t many talks that I didn’t care about and the people speaking were in all cases the best person to be speaking about a particular topic. The Django community is my favorite open source community, beating out the larger Python community by a small margin. Everyone is nice, helpful, and rarely suffer from even a marginal amount of smugness. Add food, decent wifi, and Cal’s talk “Why I hate Django” and you definitely cover the “having a good time” bit.

AppEngine

I messed with AppEngine for a couple weeks when it was first released. There were some serious rough edges that I decided I couldn’t deal with and I really didn’t completely get my head around the datastore.

Seeing Guido’s talk I noticed that those rough edges have been smoothed out and the development environment seems nicer, not to mention the documentation seems to have significantly improved. I’ve also been doing a lot of CouchDB work lately so I’ve internalized the “Document Store” concept and once I saw the Expando class provided by AppEngine I felt like I was now in a place where I can really understand Google’s datastore. It’s also not documented very well but Google’s datastore supports some geo data, which has always been a concern of mine putting too many eggs in the CouchDB basket right now. Add the fact that I absolutely hate managing infrastructure and I made a quick decision to invest once again in AppEngine or an upcoming project.

Why I Hate Django

I don’t think anyone will disagree that the highlight of Day One was Cal Henderson talk “Why I Hate Django”, he was absolutely hilarious. The video will be up eventually and I highly suggest everyone watch because it’s just too damn entertaining. I pulled a series of CC pictures from flickr in the meantime that illustrate the humor of the talk.

Live Testing

Something like two years ago I wrote a patch to add live server support to the Django Test Framework (based on unittest). That patch fell out of sync with trunk and on the floor at some point. Eventually an intern at Disqus came along and got it working again and made some really nice improvements.

Although the patch didn’t make it in to Django 1.0 I’m told it should land soon and will be in 3.1, but Disqus has been running with it all summer, using it for some Selenium tests. Well I couldn’t stand idle while Selenium test were running with Django and Windmill tests weren’t so I put my head down for about an hour during one of the talks and committed Django support to Windmill trunk. I ported the current patch for live server support in Django’s Trac so that it dynamically adds what is needed to Django and you can use this with Django 1.0 unmodified, and created a TestCase class that will launch your Windmill tests from within the normal Django python mange.py test runner. I wrote up a bit more about this in a post to the windmill-dev list.