PylonsHQ.

I’m pleased to announce after a rather length release candidate period, that Pylons 0.9.7 is finally out. Pylons 0.9.7 brings a good amount of changes to Pylons from 0.9.6 while still retaining a fairly hefty amount of backwards compatibility to ensure a mostly painless upgrade.

Some helpful documentation on the new release:

• Upgrading to Pylons 0.9.7
• Pylons 0.9.7 Documentation
• Pylons 0.9.7 Docs in PDF
• Pylons Book (Will be updated soon with the final copy from the printed book)

Major changes in 0.9.7:

• Switched to using WebOb for the request/response object
• Various performance improvements to object initialization
• Beaker and Routes updates
• Middleware improvements, and optimizations

This is a huge step forward for Pylons, and I’d like to thank all of the contributers who have helped make Pylons what it is today. We’ve knocked off more bugs for this release than any before, which shows just how far the Pylons community has come:

• 0.9.5 tickets: 45
• 0.9.6 tickets: 64
• 0.9.7 tickets: 160

And we have finally made a huge dent in the historical “lack of docs” problem that Pylons previously suffered from with the new Sphinx generated docs and a comprehensive Pylons book.

The full changelog which describes the major changes (Look for the bits marked with WARNING that might affect backwards compatibility).

0.9.7 (February 23, 2009)

• WARNING: A new option is available to determine whether or not an actions
  arguments should be automatically attached to ‘c’. To turn off this implicit
  behavior in environment.py:
  config[‘pylons.c_attach_args’] = False
  This is set to True by default.
• WARNING: Fixed a minor security hole in the default Pylons error page that
  could result in an XSS security hole.
• WARNING: Fixed a security hole in the default project template to use the
  StaticURLParser to ensure arbitrary files can’t be sent.
• WARNING: Refactored PylonsApp to remove legacy PylonsApp, moved
  session/cache and routes middleware into the project template. This will
  require projects to be updated to include those 3 middleware in the projects
  middleware.py.
• Changed to using WebTest instead of paste.fixture for app testing.
• Added render_mako_def to render def blocks within a mako template.
• Changes to cache_decorator and cached_template to support Beaker API
  changes in version 1.1. 1.0.3 is still supported.
• Fix HEAD requests causing an Exception as if no content was returned
  by the controller. Fixes #507. Thanks mvtellingen, Petr Kobalicek.
• Fix a crash when returning the result of ``etag_cache`` in a controller.
  Fixes #508.
• “response” flag has been removed from pylons.decorators.cache.beaker_cache,
  as it sends all headers along unconditionally including cookies;
  additionally, the flag was taking effect in all cases previously
  so prior versions of beaker_cache are not secure.
  
  In its place, a new option “cache_headers” is provided, which is a
  tuple of specific header names to be cached. It defaults
  to (‘content-type’,‘content-length’).
• “invalidate_on_startup” flag added to beaker_cache, which provides a
  “starttime” to the cache such that when the application is started
  or restarted, the cache entry is invalidated.
• Updating host to use 127.0.0.1 for development binding.
• Added option to specify the controller name with a controller variable
  in the controller’s module. This name will be used for the controller class
  rather than the default naming scheme.
• setup.py egg_info now restores projects’ paster_plugins.txt,
  allowing paster shell to work again after the egg-info directory was
  lost. fixes #282. Thanks sevkin.
• The paste_deploy_config.ini_tmpl template is now located at
  package/config/deployment.ini_tmpl for new projects.
• Project’s default test fixtures no longer hardcode test.ini; the ini
  file used can now be specified via the nosetests—with-pylons
  argument (defaults to test.ini in setup.cfg). fixes #400.
• @validate now defaults to translating FormEncode error messages via
  Pylons’ gettext catalog, then falls back to FormEncode’s. fixes #296.
  Thanks Max Ischenko.
• Fixed SQLAlchemy logging not working in paster shell. Fixes #363. Thanks
  Christoph Haas.
• Added optionally engine initialization, to prevent Buffet from loading
  if there’s no ‘buffet.template_engines’ in the config.
• Updated minimal template to work with Tempita and other new templating
  changes.
• Fixed websetup to parse location config file properly when the section
  isn’t ‘main’. Fixes #399.
• Added default Mako filter of escape for all template rendering.
• Fixed template for Session.remove inclusion when using SA. Fixed
  render_genshi to properly use fragment/format options. Thanks Antonin
  Enfrun.
• Remove template engine from load_environment call.
• Removing template controller from projects. Fixes #383.
• Added signed_cookie method to WebOb Request/Response sub-classes.
• Updated project template to setup appropriate template loader and controller
  template to doc how to import render.
• Added documentation for render functions in pylons.templating.
• Adding specific render functions that don’t require Buffet.
• Added forward controller.util function for forwarding the request to WSGI
  apps. Fixes #355.
• Added default input encoding for Mako to utf-8. Suggested in #348.
• Fixed paster controller to raise an error if the controller for it already
  exists. Fixes #279.
• Added init.py to template dir in project template if the template engine
  is genshi or kid. Fixes #353.
• Fixed jsonify to use application/json as its the proper mime-type and now
  used all over the net.
• Fixed minimal template not replacing variables properly. Fixes #377.
• Fixed @validate decorator to no longer catch exceptions should they be
  raised in the action that is supposed to display a form. Fixes #374.
• Fixed paster shell command to no longer search for egg_info dir. Allows
  usage of paster shell with installed packages. Suggested by Gavin Carothers.
• Added mimetype function and MIMETypes class for registering mimetypes.
• WARNING: Usage of pylons.Response is now deprecated. Please use
  pylons.response instead.
• Removed use of WSGIRequest/WSGIResponse and replaced with WebOb subclasses
  that implement methods to make it backwards compatible with the Paste
  wsgiwrappers.
• Fixed missing import in template controller.
• Deprecated function uses string substitution to avoid Nonetype error when
  Python optimization is on. Fixes #334.
• E-tag cache no longer returns Content-Type in the headers. Fixes #323.
• XMLRPCController now properly includes the Content-Length of the response.
  Fixes #310, thanks Nicholas.
• Added SQLAlchemy option to template, which adds SQLAlchemy setup to the
  project template.
• Switched project templating to use Tempita.
• Updated abort/redirect_to to use appropriate Response object when WebOb is
  used.
• Updated so that 404’s properly return as Response objects when WebOb is in
  use instead of WSGIResponse.
• Added beaker_cache option to avoid caching/restoring global Response values
  that were present during the first cache operation.
• Adding StatusCodeRedirect to handle internal redirects based on the status
  code returned by the app. This replaces the use of ErrorDocuments in
  projects.
• Refactored error exceptions to use WebError.
• WSGIController now uses the environ references to response, request, and
  the c object for higher performance.
• Added optional use of WebOb instead of paste.wsgiwrapper objects.
• Fixed bug with beaker_cache defaulting to dbm rather than the beaker
  cache app-wide default.
• The—with-pylons nose plugin no longer requires a project to have been
  registered with setuptools to work.
• The config object is now included in the template namespace.
• StaticJavascripts now accepts keyword arguments for StaticURLParser.
  Suggested by Marcin Kasperski.
• Fix pylons.database.AutoConnectHub’s doInTransaction not automatically
  connecting when necessary. Fixes #327.