The Definitive Guide to Pylons

What's Coming Up (S. 10-11)

Over the next 20 chapters, you'll learn everything you need to know to create a simple web site with a navigation hierarchy, editable sections and pages, a comment system, and tags support. The application will serve as a very good starting point for any Pylons-based web site you create. The book is divided into three parts: "Getting Started," "Advanced Pylons," and "Expert Pylons." In the first part, you'll learn the following:

How to install Pylons on Linux, Mac, or Windows in a way that doesn't interfere with other software on your system
How to use project templates to create customizable project skeletons to get you up and running quickly
The basics of HTTP and how Pylons' request and response objects make working with it much easier
The basics of the Pylons architecture and what each of the Pylons globals is for
How to use Pylons' industry-leading interactive debugger, as well as email reporting tools
How to create view templates with Mako including how to take advantage of features such as inheritance to apply consistent themes across multiple pages as well as how to use components to generate common structures such as navigational elements
How to create forms using the Pylons helpers and how to validate and repopulate them as necessary using FormEncode and HTML Fill

How to deal with file uploads and repeating validation structures involving one-to-many mappings in your model
The various software options for your model, whether it be an XML database, an Amazon S3 store, or a traditional relational database management system
How you can use SQLAlchemy to model your database, saving you time and effort At the end of Part 1, you'll also get started with the example application called SimpleSite so that you see how the techniques you've learned apply in a real application. Once you've mastered the basics, you'll move on to Part 2 to take a look at some of the more advanced features and techniques that can be used in Pylons applications.

These include the following:
How to use Routes to allow complex mappings between the URLs your application handles and the code that powers them as well as best practices for URL design and how URLs can be used as simple state stores
What Unicode is and how to use it throughout your Pylons application
How to write a Pylons application that supports multiple languages and displays non- Western characters such as Japanese or Arabic The YUI library and how it can be used to simplify your client-side CSS and layouts
The basics of the JavaScript language including the areas where it differs from Python
How to use Ajax and animation to improve your web applications
How to write effective unit and functional tests
How to use docstrings and reStructuredText to quickly and easily write good documentation for your Pylons project