© 2015 Alice Bevan-McGregor and contributors.

Dispatch is the process of taking some starting point and a path, then resolving the object that path refers to. This process is common to almost every web application framework (transforming URLs into controllers), RPC system, and even filesystem shell. Other terms for this process include: "traversal", "routing", or "lookup".

This package speaks a standardized dispatch protocol and is not entirely intended for direct use by most developers. The target audience is instead the authors of frameworks that may require such modular dispatch for use by their own users.

Installing web.dispatch.meta is easy, just execute the following in a terminal:

pip install web.dispatch.meta

Note: We strongly recommend always using a container, virtualization, or sandboxing environment of some kind when developing using Python; installing things system-wide is yucky (for a variety of reasons) nine times out of ten. We prefer light-weight virtualenv, others prefer solutions as robust as Vagrant.

If you add web.dispatch.meta to the install_requires argument of the call to setup() in your application's setup.py file, this dispatcher will be automatically installed and made available when your own application or library is installed. We recommend using "less than" version numbers to ensure there are no unintentional side-effects when updating. Use web.dispatch.meta<1.1 to get all bugfixes for the current release, and web.dispatch.meta<2.0 to get bugfixes and feature updates while ensuring that large breaking changes are not installed.

Development takes place on GitHub in the web.dispatch.meta project. Issue tracking, documentation, and downloads are provided there.

Installing the current development version requires Git, a distributed source code management system. If you have Git you can run the following to download and link the development version into your Python runtime:

git clone https://github.com/marrow/web.dispatch.meta.git
(cd web.dispatch.meta; python setup.py develop)

You can then upgrade to the latest version at any time:

(cd web.dispatch.meta; git pull; python setup.py develop)

If you would like to make changes and contribute them back to the project, fork the GitHub project, make your changes, and submit a pull request. This process is beyond the scope of this documentation; for more information see GitHub's documentation.

• Initial extract from WebCore 2.

web.dispatch.meta has been released under the MIT Open Source license.

Copyright © 2015 Alice Bevan-McGregor and contributors.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.