Grok 1.0 Web Development

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Getting to Know Grok
  • Why Grok?
  • Distinguishing Grok concepts
    • The Zope Component Architecture
    • Object database
    • Object publishing and traversal
  • Other Grok features
    • Integrated security model
    • Easy use of existing Python libraries and modules
    • Static resources
    • Relational database access
    • Python Web Server Gateway Interface compatibility
  • How Grok compares to other web frameworks
    • PHP
    • Java frameworks
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Django
    • Pylons
  • Summary

• Chapter 2: Getting Started with Grok
  • Getting a C compiler
  • Installing Python
    • Installing Python on Unix/Linux
    • Installing Python on Mac OS X
    • Installing Python on Windows
  • EasyInstall and the Python Package Index (PyPI)
  • Grok and the Python environment
  • Virtualenv
    • Installing Grok using grokproject
    • Creating our first project
    • Running the default application
  • What's inside a Grok project?
    • Overview of the application structure
    • Creating our first template
  • The Grok admin UI
    • Applications
    • Server control
    • Documentation
  • Summary

• Chapter 3: Views
  • Grok views
  • Zope Page Templates (ZPT)
    • The Template Attribute Language (TAL)
    • Expression types
    • Inserting text
    • Repeating tags
    • Conditional elements
    • Variables
    • Special variables
    • Modifying HTML tag attributes
    • Inserting structure
    • Multiple statements in one tag
    • Macros and slots
    • Going beyond ZPT basics
  • The to-do list application
  • Handling form data
  • Adding static resources
  • Putting in some JavaScript flourish
  • Summary

• Chapter 4: Models
  • Models and applications
  • Storing model data
    • The ZODB
    • Changing the title dynamically
    • The rules of persistence
  • Display logic and application logic
    • Separating display and application logic
  • Using containers and multiple models
    • Adding containers to our application
    • Adding behavior to the models
    • The TodoList model
    • Reorganizing the views
    • Introducing class annotations
    • Setting view names explicitly
    • Redirecting views
  • The Grok introspector
  • Summary

• Chapter 5: Forms
  • A quick demonstration of automatic forms
  • Interfaces
    • Example of an interface
    • Interfaces in Grok
  • Schemas
    • Available schema attributes and field types
  • Form fields and widgets
  • Form components
    • Adding a project container at the root of the site
    • Form actions
    • Trying out the application
  • Filtering fields
  • Using grok.EditForm
  • Modifying individual form fields
  • Form validation
  • Customizing the form template
  • Summary

• Chapter 6: The Catalog: An Object-Oriented Search Engine
  • Catalogs and indexes
  • Adding a simple search function to the application
    • Defining a simple index
    • Creating the search view
    • Creating a template to display the search results
  • A brief diversion: Structuring our application for search
  • Back to search: Using multiple indexes
  • Indexing different kinds of objects
  • The catalog admin UI
  • Types of indexes
  • Summary

• Chapter 7: Security
  • Authentication and authorization
  • Principals, permissions, and roles
  • Security policies
    • Default Grok security policy definition
    • Modifying the security policy
      • Modifying the default view permissions
      • Adding a new user
      • Protecting a view
  • Setting up a custom security policy
    • Creating permissions
    • Roles
  • Adding authentication
    • The Pluggable Authentication Utility
    • Registering PAU with our application
    • Adding a credentials plugin
      • The login form
      • The logout view
    • The UserAuthenticator plugin
      • Adding users
      • Basic user management
  • Summary

• Chapter 8: Application Presentation and Page Layout
  • Viewlets and viewlet managers
    • Viewlets
    • Viewlet managers
  • Understanding how the pieces fit together
    • View methods and attributes
    • Viewlet methods and attributes
    • Viewlet manager methods and attributes
  • To-do list manager layout
    • Defining viewlet managers in application code
    • Registering viewlets
    • Modifying existing views to use the master template
    • Inserting forms into viewlets
    • Using viewlets to insert different static resources
  • Layers and skins
    • Skins in Grok
  • Adding themes to our application
    • Overriding a viewlet
    • Using the new skins
  • Summary

• Chapter 9: Grok and the ZODB
  • How the ZODB works
    • Transparency
    • ACID properties
    • Other ZODB features
    • ZEO
  • Using the ZODB
    • The rules of persistence
    • Traversal
    • How Grok uses the ZODB
  • Adding Blob support to our application
    • Adding messages to projects
      • The megrok.form package
      • Adding an external package to our project
      • How blob support is configured in Grok
      • The messaging class and schema
      • The message viewlet
      • The message list template
      • Downloading an attachment
      • Testing the Blob support
  • Taking advantage of transactions
    • Using zope.app.undo
    • Testing the undo functionality
  • ZODB maintenance
    • File storage
    • Automatic packing
    • Backing up
    • Using the ZODB without Grok
  • Summary

• Chapter 10: Grok and Relational Databases
  • Object Relational Mappers
    • SQLAlchemy
    • Including SQLAlchemy in our Grok project
      • Using SQLAlchemy
  • Using a relational database for authentication
  • Handling database transactions securely
  • Creating database-backed models and containers
    • The megrok.rdb package
    • Making an application database backed
  • When to use the ZODB versus a relational database
  • Summary

• Chapter 11: Key Concepts Behind Grok
  • The Zope Component Architecture
    • Interfaces
    • Adapters
      • Real-world adapters
      • Defining and using an adapter
      • Adapters that we have used in our application
    • Utilities
      • Global utilities
      • Local utilities
    • Events
  • Extending a Grok application from the outside
    • Preparing the original application
    • The to-do plus package
      • Creating the new package
    • Adding a skin chooser form to the application
      • Adding a new skin
      • The skin chooser form
      • Using events to show the selected skin
    • Sending e-mail notifications on content creation
      • Object annotations
      • Creating the form
      • Sending the e-mail
    • Displaying additional navigation links
  • Summary

• Chapter 12: Grokkers, Martian, and Agile Configuration
  • Agile configuration
  • The Martian library
  • Understanding grokkers
    • The grokked class
    • The directives
    • The class grokker
    • The only ZCML you'll ever need
  • Creating our own grokker for zope.sendmail configuration
    • Creating the package
    • Writing our grokker
    • Using mailgrokker
  • Summary

• Chapter 13: Testing and Debugging
  • Testing
    • Unit testing
    • Functional tests
  • Testing in Grok
    • Doctests
    • Default test setup for Grok projects
      • Test configuration
      • Test files
      • Running the tests
    • The test runner
      • Test layers
      • Invoking the test runner
    • Looking at the test code
      • ftesting.zcml
      • tests.py
      • app.txt
    • Adding our own tests
      • The Browser class
      • Our first to-do application tests
      • Adding unit tests
      • Extending the test suite
  • Debugging
    • Debugging in Grok
      • The default Ajax debugger
      • Post-mortem debugging with the Python debugger
  • Summary

• Chapter 14: Deployment
  • Moving an application to production mode
  • Running the paster server in the background
  • Running Grok behind the Apache web server
    • Using mod_rewrite to serve our application from Apache
    • Installing and setting up Grok under mod_wsgi
      • WSGI: The Python Web Server Gateway Interface
      • Grok and WSGI
      • Why use Apache and mod_wsgi for Grok?
      • Setting up a clean Linux server
      • Installing and configuring mod_wsgi
      • Configuring a Grok site under mod_wsgi
      • Getting the to-do application ready for mod_wsgi
      • Configuring an Apache site to use mod_wsgi
      • Running the application
    • Adding a ZEO server
      • Buildout recipe for the ZEO configuration
      • Configuring the ZEO client
      • Launching the ZEO server
      • Augmenting the number of processes
  • More scalability: Adding caching and load balancing
    • Caching proxies
    • Load balancers
    • A high-traffic architecture for Grok
  • Summary

• Index

Carlos de la Guardia

I can easily see myself grabbing this book when I want to refresh my Zope memory before I head over to the Zope site. Read more

All in all it’s been a pleasant read and I think it’s a great introduction to Grok web framework. Read more

Sample chapters

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