Chrisw is designed to be a flexible, group-based social network site running on Google AppEngine, which shipped with an interactive web user interface.

A running version of Chrisw can be found at:

http://daoshicha.kangzhang.org or http://daoshicha.appspot.com

It now supports:

• a group-based community
• i18n. (It now supports both English and Chinese as the UI language).
• a storage designed for speed and large scale
• more features are coming :-P

Chrisw is not only a website but also a macro web framework for Google AppEngine based application development.

It contains:

def view(self, request):
  """The example for forward action."""
  # list group content and display group info
  # ...

  # add recommend groups widget in page    
  sidebar_widgets = [forward('/group/recommend').render()]

  return template('page_groupsite_view_all.html', locals())

@cache_action('group-recommend-groups', 60)
def recommend_groups(self):
  """Example for forwarded action and the cache syntax."""

  recommend_groups = [g for g in Group.all().fetch(10)]
  # .html postfix can be omit for template name
  return template('widget_recommend_groups.html', locals()) 

The above code creates a view for the given group. The recommend groups are list in a widget on the page. The rendering of the widget are forwarded to the recommend_groups handler, while the rendered html will be cached for 60 seconds in memcache. The following figure show the workflow of pipeline rendering.

The benefits of pipline rendering:

• Reuse template and data together. Why did we create so many different web frameworks? One main reason is that we want to reuse the code we have written. template enables us to reuse the display layouts, but it dose not allow us to reuse the data. Just as what we can seen in different portal and SNS sites, many parts in webpage are duplicated. Pipline rendering allow us to render the webpage part by part, then merge them together.
• More easy to use ajax. Since our page are rendered part by part, we could easily load these parts using ajax to browser.
• More parallel in future. By rendering different parts at the same time, we could reduce the page loading latency in future(We've not implemented this yet).

class WelcomeHandler(handlers.RequestHandler):

  @cache_action("welcome-page-for-{user_name}s",time=60)
  def get(self, user_name):
    slogan = 'Hi %s, Welcome to Chrisw' % user_name
    return template('welcome.html', locals())

The above code declared a welcome page for user, it will be rendered using a template called welcome.html and the locals() dict. The rendered page will be cached for 60 seconds in memcache for each user.

def get_recent_post_titles(user):
  """The example for MapQuery and Model.all()."""
  return db.MapQuery(Post.all(user=user), lambda x: x.title)\
    .order("-create_at").fetch(10)

The above code get all recent posts' titles by the given user.

and it also contains:

• an implemented authentication and authorization module
• a set of helper classes for daily development
• some useful hotfixs for Google AppEngine's django runtime
• some basic css resets

Chrisw is not ready for deployment now. It's still under heavily development.

Instructions:

1. Generate your COOKIE_KEY using os.urandom(64) and store it in local_settings.py.
2. Modify the app.yaml to specify your appengine box.
3. Run it locally and visit /unittest on your appengine box. Make sure that the program passed all tests.
4. Change the DEBUG in local_settings.py to False
5. Deploy the Chrisw to server.
6. It works now.

Most settings can be config using the settings.py, and local_settings.py The options in local_settings.py are recommended to be changed in your production release.

For more document, you can refer to

https://github.com/kangzhang/chrisw/wiki

Yes, Chrisw2 is under development. The mission of Chrisw2 is becoming a scalable, fast, module based web framework. Once it has been done, we will re-implement Chrisw using it.

Chrisw and Chrisw2 are both under construction at current time. The team for Chrisw2 is larger and full of enthusiasm. Chrisw2 will be published when it reaches the first milestone. If you've any idea of that, contact jobo.zh AT gmail.com without any hesitate. :-)

Chrisw is distributed under CPAL(see https://github.com/kangzhang/chrisw/blob/master/LICENSE) license.

Authors

Kang Zhang (jobo.zh <at> gmail.com) http://home.kangzhang.org

Version

0.5.2

License

CPAL

Python

2.5+