1   MVT Framework

The M or Model. A model is a description of the data employed in your web application.

You define your models, place them in the models file and use an ORM to access them.

Uliweb provides an ORM that wraps the SQLAlchemy package. You are however not restricted to using Uliwebs ORM. You can choose another ORM package of your choice for your models.

The V or View process is accomplished via functions or callable classes. When view function is run, Uliweb will provide an environment for the the view to run in Uliweb uses func_globals inject(You can inject objects into function's func_globals property, so you can directly use these injected objects without importing or declaring them.) So you can use request, response, etc. directly in the view function.

The T stands for template. Templates dont need to be rendered explicitly, just return a dict variable from the view function, and Uliweb will automatically find a matching template to render accrding the function name. For example, if your view function is named show_document(), the default template will then be show_document.html. If you decide to return another type of object, Uliweb will not use the above mechanism to render a default template, you will need to assign the view function a template file, this is done as follows: response.template = "new_template.html"

2   Project Organization

If you followed the instructions of getting and installing Uliweb from its SVN repository, you will notice it contains not only the core of the Uliweb framework, but also example source code and the code of the Uliweb uliwebproject site itself.

A web application is defined as a Project in Uliweb. An Uliweb web application Project consists of any number of smaller components. These components can be complete applications called Apps in Uliweb speak, middlewares, dispatch units, Uliweb core applications or Python modules of your own.

The basic directory structure of an Uliweb Project is as follows:

apps/               #Uliweb applications are placed here
uliweb/             #Uliweb core source code
app.yaml            #Used for deploying GAE based applications
gae_handler.py      #Used for deploying GAE based applications
wsgi_handler.wsgi   #Used for deploying applications using Apache+mod_wsgi
runcgi.py           #Used for deploying applications using cgi/fcgi/scgi

3   App Organization

apps/
    __init__.py
    settings.ini                #This is global settings file
    app1/
        __init__.py
        views.py
        settings.ini
        templates/
        static/
    app2/
        __init__.py
        views.py
        settings.ini
        templates/
        static/

INSTALLED_APPS = ['Hello', 'Documents']

[DEFAULT]
REQUIRED_APPS = ['uliweb.contrib.i18n']

4   Startup and initialisation process

When an Uliweb project starts up, it searches the apps folder and imports all them one by one. So if you have dispatch units or some initialization process you can write them in app's __init__.py module. Then it'll process all settings file, and create an ini object named settings and bind it to application object. As you've already known, there are many settings files, one is globals settings.ini which in apps folder, others are apps' settings file they are in their own folder. Uliweb will process the apps' settings files first, then the global settings.ini. So you can write some same name options in global settings.ini to override the apps' settings.

Then Uliweb will automatically find views module in every available app directory. View modules are files which filename starts with views. So views.py and views_about.py are both available views module, and they'll be imported automatically at startup. Why doing this, because Uliweb need to collect all URL mapping definition from all of these view modules.

5   URL Mapping Process

At present, Uliweb supports two ways to define URLs in views.

One way is to define a URL by using the expose decorator. This is the easier method. The other way is to define the URLs in each view module as normal, and then use the extracturls command to dump these urls to the apps/urls.py file. Uliweb will automatically find and import it, the expose will be automatically disabled.

To assist in URL management, Uliweb provides an url_for function. This function can be used for reversed URL creation, it'll create URLs according to the correspondingview function name. For more details, see the URL Mapping document.b

6   Extending Uliweb

Uliweb provides many ways to extend it:

• Dispatch extension. This is a dispatch mechanism. I created it myself, and it's easy and simple. Uliweb has already predefined some dispatch points, when it runs there, it'll find if there are some associated receiver functions existed, and will call them one by one.
• middleware extension. It's similar with Django. You can configure them in settings.ini, and it can be used for processing before or after the view process.
• views module initialization process. If you defined a function named as __begin__, it'll be invoked before invoke the exact view function. So you can put some module level process code there. So I suggest that you can divide different views modules via different functionalities.