[Grok-dev] spotlight on: megrok.traject

[Martijn Faassen]

Spotlight on...

megrok.traject is a package that allows a different way to publish your 
models than the traversal that is most commonly used in Zope 
applications. With megrok.traject you can define explicitly what kind of 
URLs you want to publish your models on, instead of having to construct 
an object hierarchy.

A model can be anything that you want to have views for, and doesn't 
need to be a persistent ``grok.Model``. In fact megrok.traject is most 
suitable for objects that are not stored in the ZODB, as the ZODB makes 
traversal easy.

What kind of models could you publish with megrok.traject then? It
could be just Python objects you design yourself. In this case you can 
use ``traject.Model``. You tell it under what URL pattern it should 
appear and how it is to be constructed, and you're done. 
``traject.Model`` is very lightweight: it's just a ``grok.Context`` that 
can be hooked up by a "traject pattern".

Alternatively you may want to treat your models even more lightly: you 
may wish to hook up models that are defined by a package that is not 
under your control at all. You could have for instance an ORM such as 
SQAlchemy define the models in an entirely different package that knows 
nothing about how these models should be presented on the web in your 
application. You can then use ``traject.Traject`` to associate such 
models with a URL pattern in your application.

You can look at the megrok.traject documentation for more information:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/megrok.traject

The low-level implementation is a reusable library called ``traject``, 
and its documentation can give you more details:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/traject

If you still don't understand why megrok.traject would be useful for 
*you*, don't worry. Grok's traversal method of publishing objects isn't 
going anywhere, and megrok.traject is just an option. If you have 
questions, we'd very much like to hear them on grok-dev however, so that 
we can improve megrok.traject and its documentation.

Volunteers who would want to write a tutorial oriented towards beginners 
that uses megrok.traject would also be very welcome!