What's new in CubicWeb 3.15

Sylvain Thenault — 2012-06-19T10:34-01:00

CubicWeb 3.15 introduces a bunch of new functionalities. In short (more details below):

ability to use ZMQ instead of Pyro to connect to repositories
ZMQ inter-instances messages bus
new LDAP source using the datafeed approach, much more flexible than the legacy 'ldapuser' source
full undo support

Plus some refactorings regarding Ajax function calls, WSGI, the registry, etc. Read more for the detail.

Add ZMQ server, based on the cutting edge ZMQ socket library. This allows to access distant instances, in a similar way as Pyro.
Publish/subscribe mechanism using ZMQ for communication among cubicweb instances. The new zmq-address-sub and zmq-address-pub configuration variables define where this communication occurs. As of this release this mechanism is used for entity cache invalidation.
Improved WSGI support. While there are still some caveats, most of the code which was twisted only is now generic and allows related functionalities to work with a WSGI front-end.
Full undo/transaction support: undo of modifications has finally been implemented, and the configuration simplified (basically you activate it or not on an instance basis).
Controlling HTTP status code returns is now much easier:
- WebRequest now has a status_out attribute to control the response status ;
- most web-side exceptions take an optional status argument.

The base registry implementation has been moved to a new logilab.common.registry module (see #1916014). This includes code from :
- cubicweb.vreg (everything that was in there)
- cw.appobject (base selectors and all).
In the process, some renaming was done:
- the top level registry is now RegistryStore (was VRegistry), but that should not impact CubicWeb client code;
- former selectors functions are now known as "predicate", though you still use predicates to build an object'selector;
- for consistency, the objectify_selector decorator has hence been renamed to objectify_predicate;
- on the CubicWeb side, the selectors module has been renamed to predicates.
Debugging refactoring dropped the need for the lltrace decorator. There should be full backward compat with proper deprecation warnings. Notice the yes predicate and objectify_predicate decorator, as well as the traced_selection function should now be imported from the logilab.common.registry module.
All login forms are now submitted to <app_root>/login. Redirection to requested page is now handled by the login controller (it was previously handled by the session manager).
Publisher.publish has been renamed to Publisher.handle_request. This method now contains a generic version of the logic previously handled by Twisted. Controller.publish is not affected.

New 'ldapfeed' source type, designed to replace 'ldapuser' source with data-feed (i.e. copy based) source ideas.
New 'zmqrql' source type, similar to 'pyrorql' but using ømq instead of Pyro.
A new registry called 'services' has appeared, where you can register server-side cubicweb.server.Service child classes. Their call method can be invoked from a web-side AppObject instance using the new self._cw.call_service method or a server-side one using self.session.call_service. This is a new way to call server-side methods, much cleaner than monkey patching the Repository class, which becomes a deprecated way to perform similar tasks.
a new ajaxfunction registry now hosts all remote functions (i.e. functions callable through the asyncRemoteExec JS api). A convenience ajaxfunc decorator will let you expose your python functions easily without all the appobject standard boilerplate. Backwards compatibility is preserved.
the 'json' controller is now deprecated in favor of the 'ajax' one.
WebRequest.build_url can now take a __secure__ argument. When True, cubicweb tries to generate an https url.

A new 'undohistory' view exposes the undoable transactions and gives access to undo some of them.

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