Rhetoric

Status: Beta, Unstable API.

Naive implementation of Pyramid-like routes for Django projects.

Why it is worth your while

There's a great article on why Pyramid routing subsystem is so convenient for web developers - Pyramid view configuration: Let me count the ways.

As a person who uses Pyramid as a foundation for his pet-projects, and Django - at work, I (the author) had a good opportunity to compare two different approaches to routing configuration provided by these frameworks. And I totally agree with the key points of the article - Pyramid routes are more flexible and convenient for developers writing RESTful services.

The lack of flexibility of standard Django url dispatcher motivated me to create this project. I hope it will be useful for you, and if you liked the idea behind Rhetoric URL Dispatcher, please consider Pyramid Web Framework for one of your future projects.

Project premises

• Rhetoric components try to follow corresponding Pyramid components whenever possible.
• Integration with django applications shall be transparent to existing code whenever possible.
• Performance of Rhetoric URL Dispatcher is worse than of the one of Pyramid, due to naivety of the implementation and limitations imposed by the compatibility with Django API.

Installation

Rhetoric is available as a PyPI package:

$ pip install Rhetoric

The package shall be compatible with Python2.7, and Python3.3 or higher.

Integration with Django

1. Replace django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware with rhetoric.middleware.CsrfProtectedViewDispatchMiddleware in your project's MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

   # somewhere in a project_name.settings module
   
   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
       # ...
       'rhetoric.middleware.CsrfProtectedViewDispatchMiddleware',
       #'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
       # ...
   ]

2. Inside the project's root urlconf (usually project_name.urls):

   from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
   # ... other imports ...
   from rhetoric import Configurator
   
   # ... various definitions ...
   
   urlpatterns = patterns('',
       # ... a number of standard django url definitions ...
   )
   
   # Rhetorical routing
   # ------------------
   config = Configurator()
   config.add_route('test.new.routes', '/test/new/routes/{param:[a-z]+}')
   config.scan(ignore=[
       # do not scan test modules included into the project tree
       re.compile('^.*[.]?tests[.]?.*$').match,
       # do not scan settings modules
       re.compile('^project_name.settings[_]?[_a-z09]*$').match,
   ])
   urlpatterns.extend(config.django_urls())

3. Register views:

   # project_name.some_app.some_module
   
   from rhetoric import view_config
   
   
   @view_config(route_name="test.new.routes", renderer='json')
   def view_get(request, param):
       return {
           'Hello': param
       }
   
   @view_config(route_name="test.new.routes", renderer='json', request_method='POST')
   def view_post(request, param):
       return {
           'Hello': 'POST'
       }

4. From this point you can request /test/new/routes/<param> with different methods.

Documentation

See complete documentation at http://rhetoric.readthedocs.org/