wiki:DeveloperGuidelines

Version 150 (modified by Dominic König, 14 years ago) ( diff )

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Developer Guide

Developer Guidelines

Development Enviroment

Framework

Functionality

User Interface

Quality

Release Process

Other Resources

  • Tips - useful links to explore

Mobile

  • Android - Developer Guidelines for the Android client

Python

Indentation matters (use 4 spaces instead of Tabs)

More details at: DeveloperGuidelinesCodeConventions

Web2Py

This is an MVC environment (like Rails & Django. Django polls tutorial conversion course).

Web2Py can work at several different levels of abstraction.
The Sahana Eden framework (S3) is built on Web2Py's Auth/Crud classes in tools.py (with some remnants of the older T2), however sometimes we need more control therefore need to drop down a level or two.

Recommend using the CLI to try out code snippets in the Web2Py environment (gluon, Model):

python web2py.py -S eden -M

Can execute a controller to be able to access its functions using:

execfile("applications/eden/controllers/mycontroller.py", globals())

Web2Py can be extended through Plugins & also has a recipes site.

Tutorial

This tutorial was given at SahanaCamp 1.1 in Taiwan:

Model

Defines databases in: /models/module.py

The Models are loaded 1st within Web2Py processing, before the controllers.
So you can import any global modules/set any global variables here.
The Models are imported in alphabetical order, so we load the files which other modules depend on 1st, hence naming them appropriately:
000_config.py, 01_crud.py, 02_pr.py, 03_gis.py, etc

Controller

Python functions in /controllers/module.py
e.g.

   def list_records():
       items = crud.select(table)
       return dict(items=items)

View

HTML/Javascript templates in /views/module/function.html

  • these are normal HTML/JS files with the ability to add in Python code (e.g. variables) surrounded by brackets: {{ interpreted python here }}
  • there should be an .html file available for each function in the module (name normally being the same as the function)
  • these normally inherit from views/layout.html which also includes the JavaScript from views/*_ajax.html
  • if there is no view defined then a default view will be displayed, which will show the values of all the data it can see, but not be formatted nicely

Static CSS/Javascript files are stored in /static

Javascript

  • S3 includes a cross-browser debug utility (only shows up when ?debug=1):
    s3_debug('message', value);
    

All global variables should be in the S3 namespace:

The Module Pattern should be used to protect private variables:

Deployment

Browsers default to only downloading 2 files from the same origin at a time, so many files is very slow on high latency links.

We therefore consolidate into fewer, larger files when running in Production mode.

Since GIS is a specialised app which requires many files, it's JS is loaded separately when required.

The build script is static/scripts/tools/build.sahana.py

There is also a convenience wrapper for Windows to run this & also move results into their respective locations: static/scripts/tools/build.cmd

Need to remove the '@' from '@requires' in header of /static/scripts/S3/jquery.form.js as we need to compress this without the main file.

Our build process is based on the one used by MapFish (which is built on the one used by OpenLayers)

ToDo: Investigate using other options instead:

ToDo: Investigate using LabJS to download/execute scripts asynchronously:

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