weppy is crafted to fit the needs of a large number of applications, from the smallest to the largest ones. Due to this, your application can start just with a simple python file, and scale to a better organized structure.
In this section we will cover some good patterns you may follow when your application starts becoming large, or when you just need to organize your code better.
The package pattern will make your application a python package instead of a module. For instance, let's assume your original application is structured like that:
/myapp
myapp.py
/static
style.css
/templates
layout.html
index.html
login.html
...
To convert it to a package application, you should create another folder inside your original myapp one, and rename myapp.py to __init__.py, ending up with something like this:
/myapp
/myapp
__init__.py
/static
style.css
/templates
layout.html
index.html
login.html
...
– ok dude. But what did we gain with this?
– well, now we can organize the code in multiple modules
With this new structure, we can create a new views.py file inside the package and we can move the routed functions to it.
For example your __init__.py file can look like this:
from weppy import App
app = App(__name__)
import myapp.views
and your views.py would look like:
from myapp import app
@app.route("/")
def index():
# some code
Your final structure would be like this:
/myapp
/myapp
__init__.py
views.py
/static
style.css
/templates
layout.html
index.html
login.html
...
– Nice. But how can I run my application right now?
You can use the weppy command inside the original directory of your application:
$ weppy --app myapp run
or you can create a run.py file inside your tree:
/myapp
run.py
/myapp
__init__.py
views.py
/static
style.css
/templates
layout.html
index.html
login.html
...
which can look like this:
from myapp import app
app.run()
A note regarding circular imports:
Every Python developer hates them, and yet we just added some of them: views.py depends on __init__.py, but __init__.py imports views.py. In general this is a bad idea, but here it is actually fine: we are not actually using the views in __init__.py but just ensuring the module is imported to expose the functions; also we are doing that at the bottom of the file.
The MVC (model-view-controller) pattern is widely used on web applications, is well structured and becomes handy when you have big applications.
Even if weppy doesn't provide controllers, you can implement an MVC pattern using AppModule objects. An MVC structure for a weppy application can be something like this:
/myapp
__init__.py
/controllers
__init__.py
main.py
api.py
/models
__init__.py
user.py
article.py
/templates
layout.html
index.html
login.html
...
as you can see it's an extension of the package pattern, where we added the two sub-packages controllers and models with two empty __init__.py files.
With this structure, your application's __init__.py would look like this:
from weppy import app, DAL
app = App(__name__)
app.url_default_namespace = "main"
db = DAL()
from models.user import User
form models.article import Post
db.define_models([User, Post])
from controllers import main, api
as you can see we told weppy to use the main.py controller as default for urls, so we can just call url('index') instead of url('main.function') in our application.
The main controller can look like this:
from myapp import app
@app.route("/")
def index():
# code
and the api.py controller can look like this:
from weppy import AppModule
from myapp import app
api = AppModule(app, 'api', __name__, url_prefix='api')
@api.route()
def a():
# code