Grok 0.13 was released yesterday. Grok, of course, is the powerful web application development framework. See the details in the release notes here:

http://grok.zope.org/project/releases/0.13/

The really involved details are in the changelog here:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/grok

Grok 0.13 is the first release of grok which uses grokcore.component, a standalone library that only depends on zope.component and its dependencies. We have also released a new, more powerful version of martian.

Why is this significant? There are a number of reasons:

• grokcore.component allows you to more easily use the famous Zope 3 component architecture in arbitrary Python applications.
• grokcore.component can be used in arbitrary Zope 3 projects without pulling in the rest of Grok.
• grokcore.component works out of the box in Zope 2.
• grokcore.component can also be used in arbitrary Python projects.
• Martian makes developing domain-specific configuration systems in Python a lot easier, and the new version of Martian makes it easier still, introducing a powerful way to introduce custom class-level directives. Martian has evolved to take away a lot of ad-hoc behavior away from Grok, making Grok's configuration rules more explicit, even though they continue to work the same as they did before.

I'm proud we're able to spin off cool, reusable technology like this with the Grok project. This is one of the best aspects of Zope 3 development, which Grok shares.

Of course all these reusable libraries don't take away from Grok's integrated feel. Grok is a megaframework, but it's also integrated. If you just want to use Grok to build your web applications, you don't need to worry about these underlying components unless you want move into quite advanced areas.

The 0.13 release is also the first release that includes a lot work done at the Grokkerdam sprint in early may. This includes some of the Martian work mentioned above, but also many other things. Thank you sprinters!

The work will now start on Grok 0.14. One major topic on the agenda for 0.14 is to finally get good out of the box WSGI integration for Grok. WSGI has been possible with Grok for a long time, but since it's not out of the box lots of people had to figure it out for themselves.

Another release that will happen soon is the new and improved grokproject, the tool that helps you install grok and create grok-based projects. We ran into a few minor snags at release time yesterday so we stuck with the older version, but those should be resolved soon enough.

Hopefully we'll also soon be able to publish our Sphinx-based documentation. We've been maintaining some larger, more "official" documentation in SVN for a long time, and while we've published it to the web through Plone the workflow is not optimal. We are planning to roll out per-release official documentation along with the releases in the future.

Interested in Grok? Do check out http://grok.zope.org - there is a lot of documentation that will help you get started, and we're always working on more.