Welcome!
Diva is a a lightweight web framework for Python that is built on top of WSGI and integrated with the Genshi template engine. It also uses Babel for internationalization and WebOb for a more convenient abstraction on top of raw HTTP/WSGI.
It provides support for declarative routing of requests to handler functions, the generation of URLs based on that routing, good integration of Genshi template rendering, simple declarative HTML form processing, automatic CSRF protection, pretty good internationalization and localization, a simple but flexible authentication framework, easy upstream caching control and conditional request handling, secure cookie-based session storage, a convenient stand-alone server for development, pervasive logging, and some more.
Big Fat Warning
The name Diva was chosen for its negative connotation (but also as an homage to a certain popular web framework for Ruby). Says Wikipedia:
The term is often used with a negative connotation. This derives from the implication that a star who is a "diva" is arrogant, difficult to work with, high-maintenance, manipulative, fussy, highly strung, privileged and demanding. He or she does not believe the law and accepted rules of courtesy apply to him or her.
Seriously: You probably don't want to be using this. It's a sandbox where I play with various ideas for modern web application development. Specifically, it doesn't make it easy to use a different template engine, it doesn't help you connect to a relational database (or any kind of database, for that matter), it doesn't provide an automatic admin interface or even scaffolding, it doesn't have fancy reusable widgets, and so on. And it's probably never going to do or have those things.
Also, I will be changing things, sometimes radically, without paying attention to preserving backwards compatibility.
So why am I releasing this code in the first place? Because I don't like keeping spare time code to myself, and because it might serve as inspiration for others. After all I do think Diva is a fairly elegant and beautiful framework that is worth checking out, even though it it still has some rough edges.
Anyway, if you're looking for a lightweight and well-designed web application toolkit for Python that doesn't come with such a big fat warning, I'd recommend taking a good look at Werkzeug or CherryPy. And of course there are the heavyweights such as Django, Pylons, TurboGears, or Zope.
Documentation
Some very early and incomplete documentation:
- ApplicationObject
- RequestHandlers
- UrlRouting
- FormProcessing
- SessionState
- AuthFramework
- I18nAndL10n
- RequestFilters
- ErrorHandling
- ConfigOptions
- DevelopmentServer
Examples
This framework is being used “in production” for my own personal sites http://www.cmlenz.net/ (based on Divan) and http://scratchpad.cmlenz.net/ (based on Scratchpad).
Some examples are also included in the repository:
- HelloWorld: A very simple example to get you started
- Geddit: A minimalist reddit-style news system (requires SQLite)
- Divan: A simple blogging system (requires CouchDB, BeautifulSoup, ElementTree, and python-openid)
- Scratchpad: A pastebin service (requires CouchDB and Pygments)
Download
The code is only available through Subversion for the time being. The URL is:
Feedback
There's no mailing list or IRC channel for this project. For the time being, please just contact me directly via email (cmlenz at gmail.com).
Acknowledgements
Much of this framework has been built on ideas and patterns extracted from the Trac project, and many other parts have been inspired by other frameworks and libraries.
