edit

MetaClassAutoURLS.md

@@ -50,10 +50,21 @@ Of course, this is a simple example that leaves a lot to be desired (handling at
 
 **AaronSw writes:** That's a clever idea. One improvement might be to have the classes inherit from a class with the metaclass set, so you don't have that unsightly `__metaclass__` every time.
 
+**xunil writes:** Yeah, I went w/ this approach in the end since I found that I wanted each action class to inherit some common functionality anyway.  You can [view the source](http://www.theanykey.com/svn/) for [my incomplete site](http://dev.theanykey.com) which uses a metaclass and decorators.
+
 * * *
 
 May be it's better to do it with decorators?
 
+**xunil writes:** I originally tried to use decorators to do this since I was already familiar w/ them, but unless I'm missing something, decorators don't work on classes eg.
+
+    @action("/")
+    class Default:
+        def GET(self):
+            pass
+
+That won't work.  [The PEP for decorators](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/) describes it, but apparently it was never incorporated into the language (perhaps b/c metaclasses are available and do the same thing).
+
 * * *
 
 I couldn't figure out how to get this to work with URL classes in separate files, so I did something a little different, based on [this Python Cookbook recipe](http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/436873):
@@ -81,4 +92,41 @@ And then e.g. cgi_hello.py (in the same directory) would be:
         def GET(self, name):
             i = web.input(times=1)
             if not name: name = 'world'            for c in xrange(int(i.times)): print 'Hello,', name+'!'
-Is this a terrible way to do it?
+Is this a terrible way to do it?
+
+* * *
+
+**xunil writes:** This is not altogether a bad idea, but it again decouples the URL information from the class, making it a module-level tuple or list.  You could combine your importing logic w/ my metaclass idea, actually, and achieve the same thing as me eg.
+
+    import os, web
+
+    for aaa in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
+        module_name, ext = os.path.splitext(aaa)
+        if module_name.startswith('cgi_') and ext == '.py':
+            module = __import__(module_name)
+
+    if __name__ == "__main__":
+        import metaclass
+        web.run(metaclass.urls)
+
+metaclass.py:
+
+    urls = [ ]
+
+    class ActionMetaClass(type):
+        def __init__(klass, name, bases, attrs):
+            urls.append(attrs["url"])
+            urls.append("%s.%s" % (klass.__module__, name))
+
+cgi_hello.py:
+
+    import web
+    from metaclass import ActionMetaClass
+
+    class hello:
+        __metaclass__ = ActionMetaClass
+        url = '/(.*)'
+        def GET(self, name):
+            i = web.input(times=1)
+            if not name: name = 'world'            for c in xrange(int(i.times)): print 'Hello,', name+'!'
+* * *