Blog entries

• What's new in CubicWeb 3.16

  2013/01/23 by Aurelien Campeas

  What's new in CubicWeb 3.16?

  New functionalities

  • Add a new dataimport store (SQLGenObjectStore). This store enables a fast import of data (entity creation, link creation) in CubicWeb, by directly flushing information in SQL. This may only be used with PostgreSQL, as it requires the 'COPY FROM' command.

  API changes

  • Orm: set_attributes and set_relations are unified (and deprecated) in favor of cw_set that works in all cases.

  • db-api/configuration: all the external repository connection information is now in an URL (see #2521848), allowing to drop specific options of pyro nameserver host, group, etc and fix broken ZMQ source. Configuration related changes:

    • Dropped 'pyro-ns-host', 'pyro-instance-id', 'pyro-ns-group' from the client side configuration, in favor of 'repository-uri'. NO MIGRATION IS DONE, supposing there is no web-only configuration in the wild.
    • Stop discovering the connection method through repo_method class attribute of the configuration, varying according to the configuration class. This is a first step on the way to a simpler configuration handling.

    DB-API related changes:

    • Stop indicating the connection method using ConnectionProperties.
    • Drop _cnxtype attribute from Connection and cnxtype from Session. The former is replaced by a is_repo_in_memory property and the later is totaly useless.
    • Turn repo_connect into _repo_connect to mark it as a private function.
    • Deprecate in_memory_cnx which becomes useless, use _repo_connect instead if necessary.

  • the "tcp://" uri scheme used for ZMQ communications (in a way reminiscent of Pyro) is now named "zmqpickle-tcp://", so as to make room for future zmq-based lightweight communications (without python objects pickling).

  • Request.base_url gets a secure=True optional parameter that yields an https url if possible, allowing hook-generated content to send secure urls (e.g. when sending mail notifications)

  • Dataimport ucsvreader gets a new boolean ignore_errors parameter.

  Unintrusive API changes

  • Drop of cubicweb.web.uicfg.AutoformSectionRelationTags.bw_tag_map, deprecated since 3.6.

  User interface changes

  • The RQL search bar has now some auto-completion support. It means relation types or entity types can be suggested while typing. It is an awesome improvement over the current behaviour !
  • The action box associated with table views (from tableview.py) has been transformed into a nice-looking series of small tabs; it means that the possible actions are immediately visible and need not be discovered by clicking on an almost invisible icon on the upper right.
  • The uicfg module has moved to web/views/ and ui configuration objects are now selectable. This will reduce the amount of subclassing and whole methods replacement usually needed to customize the ui behaviour in many cases.
  • Remove changelog view, as neither cubicweb nor known cubes/applications were properly feeding related files.

  Other changes

  • 'pyrorql' sources will be automatically updated to use an URL to locate the source rather than configuration option. 'zmqrql' sources were broken before this change, so no upgrade is needed...
  • Debugging filters for Hooks and Operations have been added.
  • Some cubicweb-ctl commands used to show the output of msgcat and msgfmt; they don't anymore.

  
  

  0 Comment | tagged by announce, cubicweb, dataimport, dbapi, pyro, pyrorql, release, zmq | blogged in CubicWeb Blog
• What's new in CubicWeb 3.15

  2012/05/14 by Sylvain Thenault

  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.

  New functionalities

  • 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.

  API changes

  • 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.

  Unintrusive API changes

  • 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.

  User interface changes

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

  
  

  1 Comment | tagged by announce, cubicweb, cw3.15, release, undo, zmq | blogged in CubicWeb Blog
• CubicWeb Sprint report for the "ZMQ" team

  2012/02/27 by Julien Cristau

  There has been a growing interest in ZMQ in the past months, due to its ability to efficiently deal with message passing, while being light and robust. We have worked on introducing ZMQ in the CubicWeb framework for various uses :

  • As a replacement/alternative to the Pyro source, that is used to connect to distant instances. ZMQ may be used as a lighter and more efficient alternative to Pyro. The main idea here is to use the send_pyobj/recv_pyobj API of PyZMQ (python wrapper of ZMQ) to execute methods on the distant Repository in a totally transparent way for CubicWeb.

  

  • As a JSONServer. Indeed, ZMQ could be used to share data between a server and any requests done through ZMQ. The request is just a string of RQL, and the response is the result set formatted in Json.
  • As the building block for a simple notification (publish/subscribe) system between CubicWeb instances. A component can register its interest in a particular topic, and receive a callback whenever a corresponding message is received. At this point, this mechanism is used in CubicWeb to notify other instances that they should invalidate their caches when an entity is deleted.

  
  

  0 Comment | tagged by json, pyro, sprint, sprint_feb_2012, zmq | blogged in CubicWeb Blog