Comprehensive trait support for Python
Support:
- Python 2.7+
- Python 2.6 and lower (NestedDict is based on normal dict, thus ordering is not guaranteed)
Traits are classes which contain methods that can be used to extend other classes, similar to mixins, with exception that traits do not use inheritance. Instead, traits are composed into other classes. That is; methods, properties and internal state is copied to master object.
The point is to improve code reusability by dividing code into simple building blocks that can be then combined into actual classes.
Read more from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traits_class
- Composition of Traits
- No conflicts
- Cherry-picking
- Symmertric Sum
- Override
- Alias
- Exclusion
- Supported Trait Targets
- Classes
- Instances
- Supported Trait Types
- Classes
- Instances
- Methods
- Functions
- as instance methods
- as classmethods
- as staticmethods
- Properties
- Supported trait access level
- Private class attributes
- Hidden class attributes
- Public class attributes
- Private instance attributes
- Hidden instance attributes
- Public instance attributes
- Singleton
- NestedDict
Traits are classes that are not supposed to run stand alone (nothing stops to make them work like that though). Traits are classes that are composed (by copying functions and properties) into other classes. Advantage is that there is no inheritance happening and so there are no typical problems occurring with normal inheritance. For instance, diamond inheritance is not possible as everything is copied to target class and all conflicting methods and properties needs to be resolved during composition.
In Python, this kind of approach is handy with metaclasses, since metaclasses have very strict requirements for inheritance.
This library goes bit further than extending just classes. It's possible to also compose traits into instances of classes, in which case, composition only affects single instance, not whole class. Also, this library allows cherrypicking methods and properties from other classes and composing them to target objects. If anything, it at least enables possibility for highly creative ways to reuse your code.
0.9 Bringing back compatibility to Python 2.x
- Some small clean up too
0.8 Adding support to private class and instance attributes
- Redone function binding to include recompilation of the function
- Leaving Python 2.x into unsupported state temporarily.
0.7 Improving usability of the library
- Introduced new extendable decorator, which adds function to add traits to object
- Introduced new function combine_class to create new classes out of traits
- Fixed module imports through out the library
- Improved documentation in examples
0.6 Restructuring into library
- Added support for py.test
- Preparing to support tox
- Improved multiple examples and renamed them to make more sense
- Removed the need of having two separate code branches for different Python versions
0.5 Instances can now be extended with traits in Python 3.x
- Instance support now similar to classes
- Added more examples
0.4 Completed function binding with examples in Python 2.x
- Separate functions can now be bound to classes
- Functions with 'self' as a first parameter will be acting as a method
- Functions with 'cls' as a first parameter will be acting as classmethod
- Other functions will be static methods.
- Fixed an issue with binding functions
0.3 Trait extension support without conflicts for Python 2.x
- Classes can be extended
- Instances can be extended
- Python 2.x supported
0.2 Apache License Updated
- Added apache 2.0 license to all files
- Set the character set as utf-8 for all files
0.1 Initial Version
- prepared files for Python 2.x
- prepared files for Python 3.x